Sarah Milton
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Salsa and safe sensuality
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This chapter dives deeply into the ethnographic space and the sensorium of the salsa class. Drawing particularly on Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, it explores the ways in which heteronormativity was felt through the body in different spaces – and how in various ways the body, or bodies, (re)produced certain spaces as sexualised, or not. Heterosexual femininity was done through body language; through the unspoken, bodily, and sensuous, and produced and reproduced in the spaces in which women found themselves. Despite divorce and living singly increasingly common in mid and later life, the experience of becoming unpartnered was deeply disruptive to social lives and who women were orientated around. In midlife the married moved among the married, and becoming single meant having to find new social spaces and new social networks. In a context of life transition and uncertainty, and feeling out of place, salsa classes were highly structured spaces which felt welcoming, safe and joyful. They were also intimate and close, and the pleasure of this had to be managed. The concept of ‘safe sensuality’ is developed: a way of being intimate but respectable. Alongside, and essential to, the production of the safe salsa space and safe sensuality was the production of a dangerous outside and dangerous outsiders, produced as explicitly sexual. The production of a dangerous outside space and dangerous outsiders allowed the explicitly sexual to be pushed away – and therefore the intimacy and touch, and new ways of being and moving with men, to be safe, sensual and respectable.

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Ageing and new intimacies

Gender, sexuality and temporality in an English salsa scene

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