Black Swans: Black female Ballet Dancers and the Management of Emotional and Aesthetic Labor

Ballet is an elite profession that remains predominantly white. Black dancers have been historically excluded and remain severely underrepresented in this industry through controlling images, discrimination, marginalization and rejection. Ballet demands intensive emotional and aesthetic (embodied) labor as an occupation. This thesis draws upon a mixed methods analysis of quantitative and qualitative analyses of 12 interviews, 34 surveys, and archival research to understand the experiences of Black women in ballet in context. While all ballet dancers perform both emotional and aesthetic labor through the largely unwritten and implicit emotional and aesthetic requirements of this labor, Black women have separate sets of racialized requirements and concerns they navigate alongside the emotional and aesthetic labor all ballet dancers endure. Black women in ballet negotiate colorism, racial hierarchies and a definition of femininity that marginalizes Black women, whose bodies may not conform to an Anglo-American standard of beauty. These findings build on and challenge conceptualization of emotional and aesthetic labor and discrete social practices. Rather, I show how the theories positioning emotional and aesthetic labor as distinct miss the interconnections between these two kinds of labor—interconnections that are put in stark relied in Black ballet dancers’ workplace experiences navigating overlapping systems of inequality. Using these data, I argue that emotional and aesthetic labor need to be theorized as co-constitutive