Performing Prejudice: Collegiate South Asian Dance Organizations Reproduce Conservative Values
Shimmering skirts and brightly colored halter tops glow under white lights as a cast of female dancers twirl and spin. A horde of male dancers rush onstage to join them, wearing colors contrasting with their female counterparts. They line up next to the women and form partnerships to complete the dance. These couples perform to a love song, celebrating happiness and joy as the main male and female leads lift each other in the center of the stage. The song comes to a close and a blackout follows as the audience waits on the edge of their seats for the next number.
DDN (Desi Dance Network) is a national organization of collegiate South Asian dance teams that hosts a set of dance competitions every year. Teams earn points when they perform well at different competitions, and the top earning teams compete at a national championship at the end of every season. Teams typically prepare an 8-minute medley of dances that a narrative— recent topics have ranged from Harry Potter to the Joker. DDN however has come to mean more than this organization, referring more colloquially to the world of collegiate South Asian fusion dance — a world I have come to see as rigidly defined by conservatism.
Perhaps the reason I have been thinking so much about the role of DDN in reproducing conservative values is because of my own involvement with the circuit. I have mixed music for DDN for the last three years, creating custom mixes for a wide range of teams. And as this season is coming to an end, through my support of DDN teams and their work, I have found myself reflecting upon my complicity in reproducing values that I do not stand for.
Perhaps most obviously, DDN as an institution is incredibly heteronormative and almost never represents queerness in any capacity. Everything from costumes to audition choreography is divided via binary notions of gender: boys are expected to audition using hip hop choreography, while girls perform more sexually-charged choreography or softer and more graceful classical-inspired pieces. For the process of picking members of these teams, binary notions of gender are established.
These divisions continue as parts and costumes are assigned during the season. For a team I worked with this season, while their hip hop and Bollywood segments had an even distribution of both male and female dancers, their contemporary and classical segments were almost entirely performed by female dancers. These more stereotypically “feminine” dance forms are, supposedly, not suitable for a male cast. It is equally rare to find costumes that do not aggressively denote binary gender divisions with contrasting colors for men and women and wholly different styling.
Awards, until very recently, were also awarded based on gender — “best male lead” and “best female lead” were the primary categories for dancers to win. This was primarily because almost every storyline has featured a heteronormative love story, naturally leading to the prominence of a single male and a single female lead on each team — and hence the award. However, the persistence of systems like gendered awards can, I’d argue, also prevent teams from exploring non-heteronormative storylines for fear of not bagging more awards.
The recent rise of all-male teams has also, I would argue, reproduced problematic gendered roles. Beyond defining the team itself by gender, these teams perform almost exclusively hip hop, bhangra, and kuthu, all stereotypically masculine styles. Rarely, if ever, will you see one of these teams presenting classical, jazz, or sexually-charged pieces. This practice adds to the gendered division of technique already established by co-ed teams, and continues to separate both dancers and dances by gender.
Within these all boys teams lies some hope — most have begun to have a few non-male members that dress in the same costumes and perform the same pieces as their male counterparts. The coeducation of previously all-male teams may offer us with some hope for a genderless future for DDN, but these teams are still colloquially known as “all boys teams” and are still generally considered to be all male, further associating manhood with stereotypically “masculine” dance forms.
Perhaps my gripes with the heteronormativity of DDN seem like an annoying blue-haired liberal’s gripes with a perfectly functional system. But the repercussions of such heteronormative institutions are much bigger than they may seem, I would wager. DDN teams have become the center of South Asian social life on many college campuses—these teams throw parties, host fundraiser events, and hire non-dancers to work with the team on logistics and marketing. They are the center of the desi social scenes on their respective campuses, and therefore the values they promote are implicitly the values endorsed by the entirety of the desi community.
Furthermore, when dance spaces are so rigidly gendered, it leaves almost no room for queer people to engage with the space. What would someone who does not identify as male or female do in auditions? What would they wear when costumes are so rigidly divided by gender? Would they even be eligible for any awards?
In addition to likely alienating queer people from engaging with dance spaces–and the desi community at large–the ways the DDN culture reproduces conservative notions of gender sends a message to queer desis that they are unwelcome in desi spaces. I know firsthand: as I was choosing where I went to college, the idea of going to a school with a large DDN team was honestly a fear of mine because of the heteronormativity of the space I knew I would find myself sucked into as an Indian dancer. And conversations with queer friends have confirmed that I am not alone in feeling this way.
I raise these concerns because as someone deeply implicated in the DDN space, I see no one questioning the ways in which DDN practices reproduce exclusivity and conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Desi communities on college campuses nationwide are continuing to revel in gendered art forms rather than giving space to queer people and breaking the cycles of homophobia that exist so vehemently in South Asian spaces. Instead of growing beyond the aunties, we are becoming them by continuously performing the values that they taught us rather than challenging the homophobia and rigid gender binaries baked into desi spaces.
And I think we as a community can do better to question our culture and practices, in order to make space for all desis to engage with their community on college campuses. I know I can, as someone who enables this space to exist through my musical work — and I am trying to do better to question the norms and values so heavily embedded in DDN culture. I hope we as a community can do better. And I implore all of us South Asians to think about how we engage with and reproduce the values we say we despise — after all, we must practice what we preach, and preach what we believe in.
