Here are some excerpts from my article Queering Contact Improvisation, published in Contact Quarterly in 2017:
There’s an interesting tension around gender in CI. On the one hand, CI seems to have nothing to do with gender—there are no assigned gender roles in this dance form. On the other hand, we bring our humanity with us into our improvisation, and that includes our gender. Gender shapes how we organize our bodies and move in space on a fundamental level. And gender dynamics, particularly heteronormative ones, are a key feature at many jams.
My genderqueer university students have found CI to be a paradise of gender freedom. But I know many queer dancers who don’t come to mainstream CI events because the scene is so gender normative. Moreover, the more I learn about how gender lives in the body, the more I see gender patterns playing out in my own dancing, sometimes in direct contradiction to my intentions and goals as an improviser.
…In combining both masculine- and feminine-coded qualities, CI technique actively queers gender, inviting us all to play beyond the confines of the binary. One could say that CI is a rather queer dance form!