Dancing While Black: Managing Racial Fatigue in Ballet

In the classic ballet Swan Lake , the black swan (Odile), is a role that is promiscuous, and seductive. Like Black women as a group, Odile is sexualized. Odette, the white swan, who represents purity, is the antithesis of the black swan. The paradox of Swan Lake is that Odette and Odile are both played by the same person. This is an example of the forms of discrimination that Black dancers face. In general, Black ballerinas, are denied the most valued and visible roles in ballet. They are not given a range of complexity. Black women are viewed through a monolithic lens that marginalizes them to a stereotype that is placed by racist patriarchal ideologies. This dissertation provides the analysis of the racialized and gendered inequalities that Black women negotiate in the ballet industry. The emotional and aesthetic labor that Black women endure, display forms of inequality that are on unusual display in the industry of elite ballet but also exist within other elite cultural spaces such as visual and performing art. Since its inception in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, ballet has been an exclusive profession dominated by white Europeans. In the previous centuries, ballet was strictly for royal courtiers. During the reign of King Louis XIV, the French transformed and codified ballet into an elite artform. Five centuries after its birth, in Europe and the United States ballet remains a profession that mirrors anti-Black, employment discrimination and beauty hierarchies shaped by racism and colonialism. I will employ a Black feminist lens to examine and to contribute a sociological analysis of a case that has been neglected by research on cultural fields –that is the experiences of Black creatives. Black Americans remain severely underrepresented in many creative industries, especially those that are considered elite of highbrow, such as ballet. This dissertation draws upon interviews and survey research. I conducted 50 demographic surveys of Black women and men in the ballet industry. The survey includes ...