A spotlight interview with Dr Yen Nee Wong following their book release
Dr Yen Nee Wong's book entitled ‘Equality Dancesport: Gender and Sexual Identities Matter’ is published by Routledge.
Tell us about your new book
The book Equality Dancesport: Gender and Sexual Identities Matter draws on a queer feminist lens to present a sociological framework for understanding how gender and sexuality is materialised through the dancing bodies of competitive ballroom dancers. Illuminating the experiences of LGBT+ dance competitors, the book takes readers through the initiation journey of becoming an equality dancesport competitor. It illustrates the complexities of identity work, drawing attention to the labour involved in striking a balance between reinterpreting, reinstating and transgressing norms around gender and sexuality upheld by the dancesport industry and competition frameworks. By presenting performing bodies as sites for discursive and embodied displays, the book disrupts binary ways of perceiving bodies and informs future actions towards a recognition of diverse, embodied bodies and lives both on and off the dancefloor.
Can you give an insight into the research process and journey leading up to publication?
The book emerged from my five years of dancing and researching among the LGBT+ equality dancesport community in London, United Kingdom. As a dancer, photographer and researcher, I was inspired by the creative materialisation of multiplicities of bodies, the diverse stories these bodies told, the boldness in which they disrupted dominant discourses producing ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ bodies, and the possibilities they make way for queer politicising. This book was first envisioned in late 2021, when same-sex dancing started to gain wider visibility through public discourse on whether BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing should include same-sex dance partnerships. Drawing on this public debate, I aspired to present how a more inclusive dance environment can give rise to more creative, inspiring and interesting forms of bodily expressions, such as the equality dancesport community in London.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
Contributing to our thinking around sex, gender and sexuality, I hope that the book will inspire readers to think about bodies as sites for critical reflections and resistances, and unravel the potential for their bodies to be both material and discursive, relational and resistive. I hope to inspire new ways of thinking about sex, gender and sexuality on the dancefloor and in our everyday lives.
What's next for you?
Following the publication of this book, I am currently exploring the applications of aspects of my sociological framework for examining bodies to differently abled bodies in dance, with plans for a new publication on disability representation on Strictly Come Dancing. This endeavour will be a stepping stone for my next research project examining intersectional forms of exclusion experienced within the dance industry.
About the Author
Dr Yen Nee Wong is a queer feminist researcher working at the intersections of media and culture, gender, sexuality, sociology of the body, queer theory, sociology of dance, online harms and citizen attitudes towards AI technologies. Dr Yen Nee Wong has been part of the School of Sociology and Social Policy since 2024, and is a current research member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds.
Find out more about Dr Yen Nee Wong’s research on LinkedIn, Google Scholar or ResearchGate.
