Again within the Fifties, the US authorities made a nasty determination. In truth, it made a number of, however that’s one other weblog put up. Within the Fifties, the US authorities determined that the Venn diagram of communists, artists, and LGBTQ folks overlapped a lot that every one three teams ought to be thought of a hazard to US society.
In fact, I’d be mendacity if I stated that Venn diagram didn’t overlap… so much… however till the Fifties communists and LGBTQ folks existed within the US in a state of partial-toleration that the Fifties did its easiest to eradicate. US officers flung round labels like “communist,” or “queer,” to point teams of people that had been – as one supply put it – “pathologically unable to differentiate proper from fallacious.” To be a communist, or LGBTQ, was to be thought of by many as mentally unfit to take part in American society.* The mainstream press, and swathes of the American populace, took up these beliefs and used them to violently suppress concepts and identities that they disagreed with. This included hounding an entire lot of artists out of their jobs, stripping them of funding, hauling them up earlier than the FBI, and branding them as criminals or degenerates.
Right this moment, many republicans are nonetheless utilizing the identical phrases to do the identical job.
Similar to within the Fifties, a republican accusing somebody of being a communist is commonly implying that their goal is economically incompetent, and a hazard to American society. Similar to within the Fifties, LGBTQ persons are being described on the suitable facet of the political spectrum as groomers, pedophiles, abusers, and mentally poor. It doesn’t matter whether or not the person or proposal in query is definitely communist, or truly fallacious, or truly harmful. Similar to within the Fifties, persons are being hounded out of their jobs and terrorized throughout state strains for merely showing to be a part of a gaggle that republicans really feel threatened by.
It’s a reasonably scary time to be alive.
So when Lauren Boebert declared that: “Joe Biden is robbing laborious working People to pay for Karen’s daughter’s diploma in lesbian dance concept,” she was utilizing a rhetorical tactic that’s a long time previous, and designed to fire up skepticism about queers, the humanities, un-American beliefs, and the way good People ought to be stamping all three out of existence. Throw in, as Boebert did, a beneficiant serving to of anti-intellectualism and an informal disregard for the details, and you’ve got the identical tried and true recipe that’s been used to demonize the humanities, and marginalized folks, from the Fifties to the current.
Which, after all, it why it’s each tasteless and rancid.
Had she stated “queer dance concept,” Boebert would have been barely nearer to the reality. Queer concept is a well-respected department of scholarship that may be very not often taught in undergraduate dance school rooms, however that does generally echo in the best way we work. Quite than give attention to the historical past of marginalized sexual identities or LGBTQ folks, queer concept is a manner of investigating how every kind of identities are sophisticated. How issues won’t match clearly into one field or one other. How there’s a couple of option to strategy an issue, or an individual, or an institutional design, or the previous. When dance professors inform their college students to worth the form and vary of their very own physique, moderately than upholding thinness and hyper-mobility as beliefs, they might properly have realized that from queer concept. When dance professors inform their college students that their work doesn’t should be narrative, or apparent, to be highly effective and significant, that could be queer concept once more.
If these concepts simply sound like widespread sense to you, you wouldn’t be alone. Dance and queer concept can generally be laborious to inform aside, as a result of so a lot of their concepts naturally complement one another. Cultivating creativity, creating neighborhood, adaptability to completely different conditions, partaking and empathetic communication, approaching issues with flexibility, valuing particular person imaginative and prescient… all of those are expertise {that a} dancer or a queer theorist might equally and fairly declare.
Considerably paradoxically, for Lauren Boebert, they’re additionally a few of the expertise most in demand on the job market proper now. In an age the place job necessities are altering quick to satisfy a altering world, and the place digitality has massively speed up how we talk, a excessive variety of managers are in search of smooth expertise moderately than career-specific coaching. These expertise embody crucial considering, drawback fixing, creativity, and communication; and dance does a extremely good job of educating that ability set. Time and again I see my college students dominate the job market throughout an enormous vary of various careers, as a result of dance is a lot greater than bodily coaching – it’s additionally a psychological and private toolkit that units folks as much as succeed.
Whereas dance as an business suffered throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, dancers overwhelmingly confirmed themselves to be adaptable, resilient, and there for one another. They survived, discovered new methods to succeed, and got here again stronger, and so they did it by lifting one another up and valuing distinction, not by beating one another down. To suggest that such an ethos is anti-American is to be blind to beliefs of the nation’s founding – except Boebert is arguing that the American historic document ought to take a sensible strategy to the nation’s historical past of oppression, however I’m undecided that’s her level given her document on the topic.
Lauren Boebert, frankly, appears like she might use a bit of extra lesbian dance concept in her life. Flexibility, crucial considering, empathy, and complexity are all traits that serve a politician in addition to they do a dancer. If she continues to be fearful that finding out dance may be considerably unpatriotic, let the phrases of founding father John Adams, from 1780, reassure her:
“I have to research Politicks and Warfare that my sons could have liberty to check Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to check Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, pure Historical past, Naval Structure, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, with the intention to give their Kids a proper to check Portray, Poetry, Musick, Structure, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” In different phrases, the humanities… and dance.
*The federal government’s makes an attempt to enact these beliefs throughout the Fifties are recognized traditionally because the Crimson Scare (anti-communist) and the Lavender Scare.
Copyright Fen Kennedy. Don’t republish with out permission of the writer.