PART ONE - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices:

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

~ Hey reader, thanks for being here! I am publishing a section of my final research piece I wrote for my Degree weekly in April 2020~

Part one - Intro

Sun beaming on a road adjacent to the busy shopping streets of Brighton. A freshly spray-painted wall beams its colours into the street and the chemical fumes battle with a breeze of dirty traffic air. It is here that I drop my bag upon the curb and set up the phone-mounted tripod. Plug in the rig. Grab the hoop. Waiting for a gap in the gentle stream of afternoon shoppers, I plant my feet wide on the pavement before the street art and seize the moment to spin my hoop to the blasting sounds of hip hop, funkstep, and drum and bass: it is time to execute a complex combination of my favourite tricks, and carve geometric patterns into the air with every twist and revolution of the plastic ring… 

In academic literature, the street has historically been analysed as a space of danger for women (Tonkiss, 2005:102). In this autoethnographic account, I discuss hula hooping in the street as a contemporary art form and mode of expression through which I – as a young, non-binary female – make attempts to reclaim city space by means of three interpretations of the normative modes in the city. First, I address the graffiti scene in which I ground myself to create hooping videos. Graffiti in Brighton is predominantly a masculine activity, altering how the space feels with colours and designs, and it is here I contest masculine control and normative performativity of womanhood in public space by projecting my own performance art as a female. Second, I use hooping as outdoor fitness to contest normative use of city space that has become increasingly private and commodified. Non-commodified, physical activity in public space is often a male initiative, for example the parkour scene (Gilchrist and Wheaton, 2011), enabling me to draw comparisons demonstrating how, as a biological female, street hooping challenges normative organisation of gendered fitness space. Third, I use notions of ‘home’ to extend my sense of belonging into the street through technology. As a young person who disassociates with binary gender, I further the suggestions that the sense of the home can be stretched (Ahmet, 2013) by arguing that, despite being most accessible to males, females can also enact practices that establish a sense of belonging in public space as well as the private. Unlike literature on large-scale urban social movements (Leontidou, 2006), I focus on street hooping as a day-to-day act of resistance to spatial organisation (de Certeau, 2011/1988:34). Street hooping has not yet made an entry into academic literature, so I take this opportunity to use feminist theory in an analysis of how outdoor hooping culture, enacted by females, subverts normative, gendered ideals of urban space.

~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART TWO~