Juliet McMains

University of Washington | UW · Department of Dance

A major impediment to greater integration of music and dance scholarship is the lack of common terminology. This paper aims to give music and dance scholars some tools of analysis for exploring how each of these related arts interacts with the other. After presenting analogies between terminology in music theory and movement analysis, the authors d...

This article examines how an affirmative consent model can be applied in social dance contexts and addresses how social dance teachers can foster a culture of consent in their classes and communities. This model is based on legal and cultural activists’ efforts to reduce incidents of sexual assault by shifting rape culture to consent culture. The a...

This paper interrogates the history of same-sex dancing among women in Buenos Aires' tango scene, focusing on its increasing visibility since 2005. Two overlapping communities of women are invoked. Queer tangueras are queer-identified female tango dancers and their allies who dance tango in a way that attempts to de-link tango's two roles from gend...

The queer tango movement is an international alliance of tango practitioners who seek to denaturalize the link between gender and the division of labor in a tango partnership. The queer tango space provides participants, particularly female practioners, with relief from minority stress, access to LGBTQ sexual potentiality, and experiments in gender...

Tango Nuevo by Carolyn Merritt. 2012. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. 218 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, appendix, glossary, index. $24.95 cloth. - Volume 47 Issue 1 - Juliet McMains

Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance by SherrilDodds. 2011. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 235 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index. £50.00 cloth. - Volume 45 Issue 1 - Juliet McMains

If there ever was a canon of dance scholarship to be unseated by transgressive dancing in "Doc Marten boots, stiletto heels, old skool trainers and all other kinds of vernacular footwear" (200), the dirty deed was a fait accompli a decade before the release of Dancing on the Canon. Over the past fifteen years, popular dance scholarship has exploded...

The overwhelming stench of alcohol hovers in the hotel bathroom as my dance partner lathers a fourth layer of brown body paint onto my belly. “You have to learn how to apply your tan properly,” he admonishes sternly as I squirm under the sting of chemicals burning my skin. After rejecting twelve self-tanning products, I have finally found one that...