Dancing with/out Gender

My therapist was surprised when I said that, and therapists aren’t often surprised. I had said to her, ‘Gender is everywhere. It is in the way you talk and the way you walk and your clothes.’ And she had nodded at all this, like she too felt the weight of gender in her mouth and her limbs and the fabrics of the things hanging off her. ‘It is in the way you dance,’ I had said, and her eyebrows had lifted upwards, ready to meet her hairline, commune.

Photos of you dancing as a child are serious, and in black and white. Your gangly legs are deliberate, placed where the teacher told you they ought to be.

Over and over on the television at home, you watch a red-haired woman fail to choose between her love for dance and her love for a person. Over and over you watch a woman dance herself to death. Over and over you imagine yourself as her, dancing endlessly with bleeding feet and the wind in your hair.

A bit older now, you learn, and you are told, that you are not very good. Hard to keep going after that. You give up gradually.

You don’t dance again until you start to drink. Lights are colourful and quickly hazy because at that age you drink too much. There is something you are running away from, something you are trying not to see. Easy to recognise that, looking back, although you didn’t know it at the time. Bathed in coloured pinpricks that spool out across your body, you hold your hands up in the air and move your hips in a way that is carefully sexy. It draws the eye to your waist, to your bum. Left and right, it highlights. The upward hands, reaching like stalks, pull the skin tight. This too, is intentional. There is always weight to lose. You would shed your skin if you could, you serpent, you. In these days, you do not understand what people see in clubbing. All this standing around with arms aching to the sky, waiting for the limbs of a boy to wrap you up. Dance like everyone’s watching.

The understanding of it must be credited to ecstasy, the chemical kind. Overjoyed you throw your body around, pulling it in all sorts of directions, jumping and reaching, tireless. The following day your body is spent and happy, ready to melt into a mattress whether it was yours or someone else’s. You cannot dance, you know it, but you never want to stop.

You do though. A difficult partner wants your limbs to be more contained, wants your hips to move the way they had been taught to at first, because of things that she had been taught at first that were not her fault, but were hard all the same. She likes to watch the shape of you, can’t pin you down if you jump.

Some relationships strip you.

Afterwards, you hold onto whatever you can, surfacing only occasionally which is not often enough for the lungs.

Then a lockdown. That transitions us all to sofa-bound stillness. Heavy-limbed we all wait.

Beginning to move again in kitchens filled with queers, tiles beneath our socked feet. Small groups around tinny speakers feeling our bodies again, licking each other’s joints alive. By this time your hair is short, you have shed the pronoun you began with and chosen another, you have given all your dresses to charity shops. In stillness you metamorphosed. In these first throes of movement, your legs and your arms start to explore.

We have arrived. Here, black walls sweat, and the lights are occasional. There is mesh and there is leather and there is soft, sweet feather. You dance in a circle with friends, and sober and un-sober, your body moves the same. You are reminded that dancing is stretching. In ways that are silly and sexy and otherworldly, you move your limbs. All there is to it.

I tell my therapist that I only learnt how to dance like a woman, that recent club floors have become a source of unlearning and relearning, and I am drinking from this source to feed the love of a not-quite-right body.

I like to imagine that, when I leave, my therapist stands on a couch and starts to sway.

This piece was first published in Meniscus Journal here.