Vulnerable Relations: Redefining Lead and Follow in Asian American Dancesport

This essay seeks to limn the vulnerabilities of partnering in competitive ballroom dancing. It argues that for racialized and gendered subjects who fall beyond dancesport’s normative range of aesthetic legibility, lead and follow becomes an especially fraught—yet potentially reparative—mode of relation. It brings sustained ethnographic focus to the Asian American amateur dancesport community in New York City, which not only represents a growing presence in a predominantly white industry, but unsettles its racially charged conventions of skill, prestige, beauty, and belonging. From this position, it maps a field of vulnerable relations: between Asian American amateurs and the dancesport industry, in which they remain largely marginal and illegible figures, but also between Asian American male leads and female follows. Building on partner dance scholarship that complicates assumptions about lead and follow as a one-way flow of power, it treats the embodied mechanics of dancesport partnering as a dialogic practice of mutual vulnerability, in which both dancers effectively lead and follow each other. It also attends to the aesthetic, pedagogical, and social rules that put pressure on competitive couples—demanding resilience, even detachment, at the expense of that mutual vulnerability. In parsing what is contradictory, even compromising, about Asian American dancesport practice, this essay theorizes lead and follow as a mode of relation that involves opening ourselves up, and remaining open, to risk—but also, to the possibility of exquisite moments that can only be co-created.