Red Nails, Black Skates

GENDER, CASH, AND PLEASURE ON AND OFF THE ICEBy ERICA RAND

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5197-9

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….viiIntroduction. Skate to Write, Write to Skate………………………………………..1Introduction. Being in Deep……………………………………………………….171. Seeing and Getting…………………………………………………………….202. Sandbagging, or Grown-Ups Do This?………………………………………………263. Score………………………………………………………………………..32Introduction. Pleasure Points……………………………………………………..434. Skating Is Like Sex, Except When It Isn’t………………………………………..465. The End of Me, or My Brief Life in Hockey………………………………………..526. When God Gets Involved…………………………………………………………60Introduction. Redoing the Laces……………………………………………………717. White Skates Become You………………………………………………………..738. Form-Fitting: The Bra in Three Stories…………………………………………..799. My Grandmother’s Shoes…………………………………………………………8510. Black Skates, or the Stake in Wanting…………………………………………..89Introduction. Athletic, Artistic, or Just Plain Perverse……………………………..9711. Skank or Ballerina: Codes of the Crotch Shot…………………………………….10312. Cracking the Normative………………………………………………………..11113. Oh, Right, Policing Femininity: Nine Inch Nails at Adult Nationals…………………11714. Booty Block: Raced Femininity………………………………………………….128Introduction. Masculinity with Teeth……………………………………………….13915. “I Stand beside Him with an Axe!”: Hockey Guys Together…………………………..14416. Quads Make the Man, or What’s too Gay for Men’s Figure Skating…………………….15317. The Girl who Fooled My Butchdar………………………………………………..160Introduction. Up from the Bottom…………………………………………………..16918. Buy-In: Some Notes on Cost…………………………………………………….17419. So You Think You Can Train, or Why Can Joshua Dance?……………………………..18020. Gifts of Nature, Freaks of Culture……………………………………………..186Introduction. Blade Scars/Biopsy Scars……………………………………………..19921. Parsing Perilicious…………………………………………………………..20422. Telling the Mrs………………………………………………………………21023. What Sticks Out………………………………………………………………21524. Losing her Manhood……………………………………………………………21925. Pleasure on Its Face………………………………………………………….22726. Politics at Hand……………………………………………………………..23527. Getting the Goods…………………………………………………………….242Conclusion. If I Ruled the Rink, or Make the Rink by Skating………………………….249Notes…………………………………………………………………………..263Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….285Index…………………………………………………………………………..297

Chapter One

Seeing and Getting

Imagine yourself in the stands at one of the U.S. Figure Skating (USFS) regional championships, or “Regionals,” watching a group of young skaters compete in the category “Juvenile Girls.” What can you discern about them and how? If you ordinarily pay no attention to skating but have a schedule or program, you can probably tell that Juvenile Girls compete at the lowest level offered there. The exact order of the levels—Juvenile, Intermediate, Novice, Junior, and Senior—doesn’t make obvious sense. But Juvenile definitely sounds young, even a bit nastily like those hockey categories for kids: Mite, Squirt, Peewee, Bantam (small chicken?), and Midget. Besides, competitors at all the other levels skate as “Ladies” and “Men” rather than “Girls” and “Boys.”

Looking around can be informative, too. Dresses for Juvenile Girls, for instance, may suggest a general consensus about the standards of femininity deemed to suit “Girls” aspiring to be “Ladies,” although even from a distance contradictions may emerge. Rhinestones can appear to betoken custom tailoring or mall-chic Bedazzling gone amok. Dresses and makeup geared at upscale elegance can instead look like déclassé, age-inappropriate oversexualizing, especially if you don’t know that plunging necklines and backlines only fictionally bare skin. Flesh-colored “illusion fabric” covers much that more visible material doesn’t.

Prior understandings gleaned elsewhere can make the scene look different still. Pop skating movies, for instance, almost universally portray figure skating competitors as bitchy, backstabbing girls, sometimes with bitchy, backstabbing parents, whom unsophisticated skaters encounter at their peril. In the 2005 Disney movie Ice Princess, Casey, the protagonist, is a brainiac high school student new to skating whose science skills propel her to rapid skating success. Not knowing yet that high-performance skates must be broken in, she mistakes an act of sabotage for sportsmanly, aristocratic generosity when her competitor’s evil mother buys Casey new skates at a competition. Bloody feet, falls, and an overall bad performance result. In the 1978 cult classic Ice Castles, Lexie comes from rural isolation to compete at Regionals in a clunky, handmade skating dress, with her name clumsily embroidered on its hopelessly dorky Peter Pan collar. The dress symbolizes her fate as she loses to girls with less talent but more sophistication. From a perspective shaped by movies like this—even given their obvious melodramatic license (Lexie later loses her eyesight in a freak accident and triumphs anyway)—a person might be prompted to wonder about the personalities behind the scenes as well as the function of the outfits. Is the right skating dress a component of victory rather than simply a marker of athletic fashion?

Prior viewing of competitions or skating shows, in person or on TV, can also be a source of illumination or of confusion. Why do some of the Juvenile Girls seem so advanced? Well, in a common practice that is known, at least to people who question its ethics, as sandbagging, skaters may improve their odds of winning by deferring tests that would move them into a higher level of competition. One might expect skating regulators to frown on sandbagging, which seems far from good sporting practice. But USFS actually acknowledges, allows, and tacitly supports this practice by giving skaters a lot of leeway about what they can include in their programs. Juvenile Girls, for example, need only single jumps to compete in their category. Yet the guidelines found on the Well-Balanced Program (WBP) charts allow all doubles, forbidding only triples. As a result, Juvenile skaters who win regional championships, and many who don’t, can do more and score higher than many skaters competing several levels up. In the 2009 New England Regional Championships, the winner, with seven double jumps in her program, received 50.66 points, outscoring half of the Junior Ladies. Scoring, too, then, is no simple indicator of level—or, actually, of anything. It’s hard to figure out exactly what a 50.66 means, even if you know that each trick or element has a base value (e.g., 3.60 for a double flip-double loop jump combination in the 2010–11 season), with other marks for qualities like “choreography” and “interpretation” factored into the total score.

What You See, What You Get

I sometimes think of participant-observation fieldwork as a series of activities pursued systematically to facilitate doing something that people do all the time in diverse ways: try to move from seeing to getting, to make sense of what we perceive. I use “seeing” metaphorically; a key feature of participant observation is embodied study that uses all the senses. Participant observation isn’t fully distinct from other forms of serious attention, although certain features separated my research, I think, from other forms of being engaged in skating. I had a responsibility to avoid violating the institutional codes of academic practice, known as Institutional Review Board (IRB) rules, that govern research involving “human subjects,” or, in other words, studying living people by interacting with them. I pursued some endeavors for research that I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise, like competing and playing hockey. I thought about my behavior and appearance partly in terms of what might aid or thwart productive interaction, and I undertook some pursuits more systematically than I would have otherwise, like skating at several rinks in an area I visited even if I loved the first one I found there. I sometimes took numeric stock of certain skating staples, such as the percentage of female competitors wearing ballet buns at the 2009 Synchronized Skating championships: nearly 100 percent, setting aside the skaters whose whole teams were pony-tailed.

Yet the fruits of fieldwork do not always come from the systematic parts of it. For example, I got hooked into the local women’s hockey scene, which dramatically transformed my project, through a coach I met at a party who knew the host as her former neighbor. Meanwhile, as common descriptions testify, people often pursue information systematically for reasons other than academic. They read or watch everything they can get their hands on; religiously follow certain blogs; memorize sports statistics; or pursue objects of fandom across media, tabloids, and water coolers.

Besides, even though the goal of moving from seeing to getting is a good description of the overall project of fieldwork, seeing and getting relate to each other in more ways than the idea of traveling from one to the other conveys. Illuminations can be sudden or fleeting. They can redirect me immediately back to what I don’t know, forgot, or now see differently. For example, one former Juvenile Girl I know is now an adult male. If he had once skated as a “Juvenile Girl,” then who’s to say that any group of such skaters presents the array of female-identified people that it appears to? I know full well that many people do not comfortably inhabit, or continue to live in, the sex they were assigned at birth, or the clothes considered proper to that sex in particular situations. Yet encountering him offered an important reminder: Even among a group of kids whom one might imagine to self-select into a sport with such regimented femininity, a number may be ill-represented to varying extents by the outfit.

But they are not necessarily totally ill served. The skater I just mentioned remembers being increasingly miserable as the dissonance grew between the femininity he was admonished to refine for the sport and the male identity he was coming to recognize. Another former Juvenile Girl, however, who has always identified as female but is far from feminine, found in girly skating attire, paradoxically, a way to escape some restrictive perceptions, including her mother’s, about what was proper for girls. She happily made the trade-off. She’d wear the dress, the makeup, the bun, anything asked of her, as long as she could go out on the ice and jump.

Sometimes getting is not about solving a mystery but figuring out later what I didn’t get in the first place, sometimes by discovering what others don’t know. A cousin’s outrage at the skimpiness of skating dresses she’d seen on TV shifted when I told her about the illusion fabric. The conversation helped me figure out that knowing about it can affect people’s perceptions of how risqué the outfits are. It was an interesting finding that people might interpret pretend bared skin differently than actual bared skin. Our interchange also reminded me about how easily you can forget acquiring knowledge that transforms your perceptions. Once you know about illusion fabric, its faint necklines and slight deviations from a skater’s skin color often come readily into view.

Similarly, I remember being stunned at my first Adult Nationals to discover that almost all the women competitors competed in some version of the traditional skating dress, although I’d grown accustomed enough to seeing adult women in matching show-number costumes. By 2007, I could recognize (because I had formerly had it) the reaction of a student research assistant when he came to take some field notes at the Portland rink’s annual show: Eww, he thought, the girls are dolled up like women and the women are trying to look like girls. But I’d presumed that adults would choose differently for their own programs. Now I’m so accustomed to seeing those skating dresses in competition, if not to wearing them, that the sight doesn’t look odd, and the category of dress that signals to me “trying to look decades younger” has shrunk significantly.

How to Get There from Here

Similarly, if what awaits getting becomes clearer in the process of getting it, so, too, I think, does the process of getting. A few weeks after attending the New England Regionals in 2007, I told a local skating friend that I had been struck by the sophistication and material trappings, in excess of what some of our local skaters display, that placing well seemed to demand. Yes, my friend replied adamantly, that’s exactly why many girls don’t make it past one trip to Regionals. She told me about an acquaintance’s daughter, a “home-grown skater,” from a nice but not fancy skating environment. When she encountered the girls coming from powerhouse training centers, she wilted. That was the end, right there. The regimen, accomplishments, and accoutrements that had made her feel like a serious skater made it obvious to her that she could never be a contender.

This was echoes of Ice Castles minus the fairy tale, but I find a better source of comparison in another friend’s story about playing basketball as a teenager on an all-city team in Kuala Lumpur. Accustomed to being star players, the kids got trounced by a team from an affluent international school after the shock of seeing the school’s facilities when they arrived to play. The school had an indoor gym, locker rooms, and a pool, far outclassing the visitors’ well-worn outdoor courts. The visiting team, my friend remembers, felt humiliated and intimidated. Feeling out of their league socially, they played as if they were out of their league athletically.

Nice venues or upscale costumes, then, do not merely satisfy judges or reflect disposable cash for training, although, of course, they do that, too. The same people who can afford expensive training are the ones who can pay to have just the right glassy stones affixed to their skating dresses by precisely those dressmakers who know the codes of tasteful sparkling. Yet these stories also suggest that the very spectacle of means—especially delivered as stinging new evidence about lack and ignorance— contributes to performance along with the amenities that cash can deliver.

So much, then, is in the mix to figure out about understanding, even concerning this one issue. What in particular was so daunting in these panoramas of affluence? Dresses that look expensive or highly polished arm movements? A gym that has new bleachers or one that is simply indoors? From what angle, with what details, for whom exactly, and with what consequences do these spectacles emerge? While the idea of moving from seeing to getting may conjure a path laid with increasing information, what lies between often seems to me more like a hole or gap that’s far from empty, filled with issues and sources of information that are more or less tangled, more or less knotty, more or less murky.

One other matter concerning seeing and getting: the fact or feeling of getting, not getting, being gotten, or not being gotten has politics, effects, and emotional content. Not getting, for instance, can hinder or reflect power. As Eve Sedgwick points out, the cliché that power is knowledge obscures the way that power confers the right not to know, as when political leaders from the United States can count on having their international interactions conducted in English. Not getting can annoy or enrage. It can barely register, bemuse, panic, or hurt like hell. Think about the many possible intonations and implications of “Wow, you really like that?”: Who cares? How interesting. Stay away from me. No, bring me in. Wait, can’t you want this, or that, or me, instead?

Get This, or Don’t

Fieldwork can reveal various relations to seeing and getting. For me, every day of working in the gap between seeing and getting meets, thwarts, leads to, and engenders moments of insight and connection. Sometimes getting and not getting are like flipping an on and off switch. Sometimes I want to climb into messy knots and just live there. Sometimes I want to untangle them. Sometimes I want to bust them open in the mythified fashion of storming the Bastille. That’s the case with the topics I take up next.

Chapter Two

Sandbagging, or Grown-Ups Do This?

I had a big clue several months after the Gay Games that some adults take actions in the quest for medals that might seem over the top when several people pointed out to me that the results posted online indicated a change in rankings for one event. There was one likely explanation: that the competitor whose placement rose, and who had been visibly and vocally angry about the outcome at the time, had contested the results. I was surprised. I’d learned of this grievance procedure at the on-site skaters meeting preceding the events. But I’d paid more attention to a rule suggesting a different relative value of winning. Skaters who find themselves alone in their category can agree to “compete up” against people whose age (younger) or tests passed (harder) puts them at an advantage, at least on paper. I’m sure my limited experience with competitors and competition contributed to my surprise. But others were confused, too: “At the Gay Games—really?”

Several years of skating and fieldwork later, my shock and confusion had been rerouted to curiosity about when and why grown-ups sandbag, that is, skate below their level, by deferring proficiency tests to increase their odds of winning. In usfs, the Adult skating levels are Pre-Bronze, Bronze, Silver, and Gold—named semiconfusingly after competition hardware. In addition, there are higher “Masters” levels based on tests that most Masters skaters passed as kids. Each level has two tests: the Free Skate test, with mandatory jumps, spins, and footwork; and Moves in the Field, which includes elements like edges, crossovers, and turns.

At Adult Nationals (or an), sandbagging clearly abounds. Yet when and why people sandbag are not always clear. Competitors at my level, Bronze, often demonstrate that they can easily perform all of the jumps and spins on the Silver Free Skate test, often with a speed and comfort suggesting that they tested Bronze years earlier. Yet their programs may camouflage other limits. A skater may have the jumps and spins, which get all the attention, but not the back inside 3 turns that the Silver Moves test requires. In addition, certain skill levels involve age-related likely ceilings. Passing the Gold test, for instance, entails mastering an axel, a one-and-a-half revolution jump that requires a skater to jump from forward to backward, assume a backspin position, and then rotate one more time, all before coming down. A skating friend in his forties calls the axel the Holy Grail of adult skating. Unless you “had” an axel when you were a child, it’s really hard to land one later—”land” is the skating term for successfully completing a jump, and “having” a trick means being able to execute it consistently—especially after one’s (twenties or) thirties, even for adults who continue to advance in spins, footwork, flow, and jump combinations. Even the top Silver skaters may never be able to advance beyond their level.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Red Nails, Black Skatesby ERICA RAND Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.