Claire Birkenshaw
“For girls. Not for lads, Billy. Lads do football, or boxing, or wrestling. Not friggin’ ballet!” (Billy Elliot, 2000).
The dramatic kitchen table confrontation between Billy and his dad about the discovery of Billy’s pursuit of ballet instead of boxing, is a knock-out moment in the film Billy Elliot (dir. Daldry, 2000). Within a few minutes of combative film dialogue, those undisputed, it “goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Bourdieu, 1977, p.169, original emphasis), social rules that invisibly regulate human action, such as how we ‘do’ gender, are explosively exposed on screen.
Like two boxers glaring at one another with incendiary incredulity as they occupy antagonistic gender positions in their respective corners, Billy and his dad trade verbal ‘gender rules’ jabs as they both try to gain the upper hand to deliver the decisive blow for gender legitimacy. In one corner, Billy’s dad wears the shorts of gender tradition, or doxa (ibid. p.164), and seeks to uphold the local ‘gender regime’ (Connell, 2021, p.73). In the other, Billy adorns the shorts of gender heresy, or heterodoxy, because he disputes and challenges the local gender doxa governing appropriate pursuits for girls and boys. “What’s wrong with ballet? It’s perfectly normal,” Billy retorts calmly, and matter-of-factly, to his dad’s fury at his dance with the feminine.
As the bout slugs out between father and son, another doxa, one deeply entangled with gender, daringly erupts – sexual doxa (see Atkinson, 2020, p.120) – the unspoken becomes provocatively spoken: “It’s not just poofs dad. Some ballet dancers are as fit as athletes,” advances Billy, as though he were trying to reassure his dad about his trajectory toward ‘proper’ manliness and sexuality. It is a salient juncture within the scene, and reaffirms Sedgwick’s (1993, p.69) view that there is a “long tradition of viewing gender and sexuality as continuous and collapsible categories.” As Billy’s dad’s ‘boys do’ dialogue reminds us, interests, or activities, are gender coded to correspond with gender and sexual logics: ballet is for girls, thus feminine; boxing, on the other hand, is for boys, and therefore masculine. Boys who pursue activities coded as feminine are assumptively feminine and will, at some point, desire the masculine. Hence, they must be gay, even if they do not know it yet. For boys to be thought of as feminine then, troubles both the gender and sexual doxa. As such, it strikes fear in the men who have long since acquiesced to well-established gender and sexual doxa, which is why the choice of song selected by Billy, Cosmic Dancer (Bolan, 1971), during the film’s opening scene is so poignant and key to establishing the film’s meaning. “Is it wrong to understand the fear that dwells inside a man?” enquires the song’s protagonist. To answer Bolan’s question then, invites use of sociological imagination.
Famously coined by sociologist Charles Wright Mills ([1959] 2000), sociological imagination “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society” (p.6). This, according to Mills, “is its task and promise” (ibid.). What may seem like a personal trouble, idiosyncratic to the individual, could, in fact, be the result of wider public issues. Given that we are all entangled with the social as we go about daily life, thinking sociologically “demands” (Giddens and Sutton, 2021, p.5) that we disconnect from the immediacy so that we can “think ourselves away” (ibid.).
To structure sociological imagination, Woodman and Threadgold (2021, p.4) suggest four themes to guide sociological questioning to explain the social: historical; cultural; structural; and critical. Furthermore, these themes can be augmented with a ‘feminist curiosity’ (Thompson and Armato, 2012, p.9) to “question what others take for granted” (ibid.) in terms of gender. If we apply this rationale to Billy Elliot to illustrate, a series of questions can be generated. How have past constructs of gender influenced the present to cause people to think and act as they do? How is culture influencing how people do gender? How do social organisations and institutions influence gender? Who benefits from the established gender order? Is it socially just? What needs to change to realise gender equality and equity? What alternative future gender arrangements are possible? While these questions are directed to Billy Elliot, they could just as easily be directed to schools, colleges and universities. As Woodman and Threadgold (2021, p.1) point out, sociology brings “to light” the “hidden dimensions of our lives” and helps to, as Gidden’s (1997, p.3) posits, explain “why we are as we are, and why we act as we do”, and that includes how we all ‘do gender’.
References
Atkinson, W. (2020) Bourdieu and After: A Guide to Relational Phenomenology. Abingdon: Routledge.
Billy Elliot (2000) Directed by Stephen Daldry [Film]. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures; Studio Canal; BBC Films; Working Title Films; Tiger Aspect Pictures.
Bolan, M. (1971) Cosmic Dancer. London: Fly Records.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated from the French by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connell, R. (2021) Gender: In World Perspective. 4th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, A. (1997) Sociology. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, A. and Sutton, P.W. (2021) Sociology. 9th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sedgwick, E.K. (1993) How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay. In: Warner, M. ed. Fear of a Queer Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 69-81.
Thompson, M.E. and Armato, M. (2012) Investigating Gender: Developing a Feminist Sociological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Woodman, D. and Threadgold, S. (2021) This is Sociology: A Short Introduction. London: SAGE.
Wright Mills, C. ([1959] 2000) The Sociological Imagination. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Suggested citation
Birkenshaw, C. (2023) Billy Elliot and Sociological Imagination. Altered States of Academia, 25 November [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2023/11/25/billy-elliot-and-sociological-imagination/> [Accessed ? ].
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