Annamari Konttinen, Jaana Lång, Johanna Nurmi & Terhi Toppala

Gender Performances in a Finnish Restaurant with Dancing

A Finnish dance restaurant is a public and social arena which incorporates constant opportunities for display and surveillance of bodies. Being in a ball room means being gazed at. Performing one’s body and gender is accentuated in several practices, like how to use the space in a ball room, how to ask someone to dance and how to dance. Pair dancing is a special form of performance which constructs gender and produces sexual difference. At the same time appearance, gesture and bodily demeanour in the ball room are considered as producing and expressing the self.

The data of our research was collected by doing participatory observation in a dance restaurant called Galax, in Turku. We will outline the social practices connected with dancing, using Erving Goffman’s metaphor of the stage as well as Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender. We approach pair dancing as a social form which sustains gender difference and allows having regulated physical proximity with the opposite sex. We examine pair dancing from two perspectives. On the one hand, we are interested in how body and gender are constructed in a ball room and in the practices of pair dancing. On the other hand, we examine pair dancing as a form of interaction with the opposite sex.