What’s Your Pleasure?: Gender at the Ice Rink, at the Gay Games, and in Everyday Life

A lecture by Erica Rand

A core feature of my new book-length project comes from participant-observation research undertaken as a middle-aged figure skater. I became interested in figure skating as a research topic in 2002, when I agreed to skate in the adult production number at my local rink in Portland, Maine. I’d been back on the ice for about five months, almost 30 years after a bit of childhood skating. At the first rehearsal, I encountered a dilemma about gender that pitted my politics against my pleasures. The theme of the number was “Artists and Models.” The men, we learned, would be the artists and the women would be models. How ironic for a feminist historian of visual culture to be enacting a gendered vision of the art world I’d worked to expose, critique, and transform. Yet I soon guessed the unpleasant likely effect of making a big deal about it: I’d be assigned to play an artist, which would mean having to forego the women’s costume, a lovely little black dress with skinny, sparkly pinstripes. Meanwhile, here I was, new to performance, new to and thus low in the skill set, and, most importantly, new to a community of adult skaters that I thought I’d really like to part of. What would it mean to call this particular norm of gendered performance, which no one else seemed to care about, into question? I chose, as it were, to get with the program.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about how gender may be alternately or simultaneously far more complicated and far more mundane than one might expect. My rink friends come to mainstream gender, if they do, on twisted paths. The skating at the Gay Games, where I competed to study what happened to gendered sports training in a queer context, looked pretty much like normative skating. Most of the dykes were femmes, most of the men looked like their higher-level counterparts. (Then again, who really thinks of ordinary men’s skating competitions as the “Straight Games”?) OF course, much more is complicated than gender (or with gender). Consider, for instance, what impelled just two skaters I interviewed at the Gay Games to undertake the sport: one began skating after he “blew out his elbows” during the first Gulf War and needed a sport low on arm strain; another began as a “mindfulness practice” as his lover was dying of AIDS. What enables either of those people to pursue this sport—with standards mired in expectations of movement shot through with habits and prejudices regarding gender, race, culture, sexuality, class, and cost—is another, but not quite another matter.

This talk will address some of my emerging issues and questions as I develop this research project. Besides or as part of those to which I gesture above, these involve: 1) a commitment to understanding gender as fully complex whether trans/gender or otherwise, but sometimes as equally un-fancy from allegedly fancy positions; 2) the question of how we might understand culture more as a “participant/observation” project. I don’t mean that everyone is a researcher—although I do think everyone is a theorist—but that while we tend to view culture as a spectator sport, even when we understand spectatorship as dynamic, many more people participate in production than such a model suggests; and 3) the matter of how really to value and validate pleasure and its pursuits in life and research. For years I’ve been working in teaching on trying to open up space to consider that while it’s great to critique, for instance, gender norms and stereotypes, we might also consider the fraught matter of how they may also be pleasures. Now that I’m crafting a topic where, one might say, the oppression component does not seem to be dating the pleasure topic as clearly or as visibly as in my earlier work, I find that my adamant pro-sex, pro-pleasure self-conception and self-representation has more cracks than old nail polish.

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