Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Shortbio
Val Meneau (they/them) is currently a research associate at the University of Vienna, Austria. They completed their PhD with distinction in dance studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria, with a dissertation entitled DanceSport’s Economy of Desire – a Dispositive Analysis of the Heteronormative Gender Binary in Latin Competitive Dancing, for which they have received a scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and two awards, from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the University of Salzburg. They have held positions at the Institute of Sociology in Graz and the Institute of Dance Studies in Salzburg and have presented on body and sexual politics in DanceSport at many conferences in gender, queer, and critical dance studies. Val has worked with the Austrian Task Force on the adaptation of heteronormative competition regulations to include same-sex couples and is committed to scholarly outreach within the community.

Forschungsschwerpunkte

• Critical dance studies
• Popular dance and gender performances
• Body and sexual politics
• Marginalised groups‘ representations in media and dance
• Queer, trans, and gender studies
• Qualitative social research

Publikationen
Val Meneau, ‘Coding sexual violence as love–choreographed heteronormative gender performances in Latin American competitive dancing,’ Journal of Gender Studies 29, no.8 (2020), doi: 10.1080/09589236.2020.1823824.

Val Meneau, ‘Queer Dancers’ Experiences in the DanceSport World: Exclusion, Invisibilisation, and Assimilation,’ Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion 43, no.9 (2024), doi: 10.1108/EDI-11-2023-0376.

Projektbeschreibung
Val Meneau is currently working on their first monograph, titled DanceSport’s Economy of Desire – a Queer Feminist Perspective, to be published by Bloomsbury. In this book, they argue that the DanceSport dispositive - Foucault’s term for a network of power - creates and maintains an economy of desire that shapes its actors’ (in Latour’s understanding) possibilities, desires, and choices, leading to the reproduction of the heteronormative gender binary in Latin dance performances. In doing so, the dispositive constrains what Latin dance can look like, despite resistance and counter-movements, by excluding or invisibilising queerness and objectifying and sexualising female dancers. DanceSport’s Economy of Desire is based on fieldwork and interviews Val Meneau conducted over four years in Europe and Northern America; discourse analysis of judging criteria, technique books, syllabus books; and dance analysis of dance lectures, and dance performances. The breadth of the evidence base allows them to show how the DanceSport world constrains what Latin dance can look like in all elements that affect or constitute dancers’ performances on the (competition) dance floor – registration, clothing, coupling, partnering, moving, judging.