Abstract
This chapter explores queer male dancers’ experiences of gender and sexuality in conservatoire contexts. Recognizing the historic and ongoing homophobia that surrounds male participation in dance, the authors draw on ideas of queer failure to expand understandings of male experiences in elite dance training institutions while offering pedagogical insight. Through an ethnography involving semi-structured interviews and autoethnographic writing, McIntosh and Buck provide detailed stories of queer failure, juxtaposing the participants’ extant meanings of queer failure with the conservatoire cultures that compound them. Calling for a queer turn away from homophobia toward a participatory pedagogy, the chapter concludes with a challenge for dance educators to reorient in favor of failure, diversity, and affirmation.
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Financial support for the research in this chapter was provided by a University of Auckland Research Masters Scholarship.
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McIntosh, H., Buck, R. (2022). Dancing Between Queer Failure and Participatory Pedagogy. In: Risner, D., Watson, B. (eds) Masculinity, Intersectionality and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90000-7_8
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