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Anybodys “in and out of the Shadows”: The Threshold of Visibility and Queer Orientation in West Side Story

2022; American studies; Volume: 61; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2022.a913746

2153-6856

Daniel Belgrad, Ying Zhu,

Cinema and Media Studies

Anybodys “in and out of the Shadows”: The Threshold of Visibility and Queer Orientation in West Side Story Daniel Belgrad (bio) and Ying Zhu (bio) This essay explores the constructions of sexuality and gender in the film West Side Story through a close reading of its choreography. In particular we focus on the choreography assigned to Anybodys, whom literary critic David LaFontaine has identified as “Broadway’s first transgender youth” (La Fontaine 2017). In keeping with LaFontaine’s reading and to underscore the difference that it makes, throughout this piece we refer to Anybodys by using they/them/their pronouns, except in instances of a direct quotation from other sources. Although scholar and filmmaker Frances Negrón-Muntaner contends that for the makers of West Side Story Anybodys was a figure of “scorn for the potential lesbian who struggles for a place among men… the misogyny of her representation is not far from the surface” (2000: 99), Anybodys is not really coded in the musical as a lesbian. They are not interested in sex with girls. Their desire to fight alongside the boys positions them more as a gay transgender man. More accurately, perhaps, Anybodys is, like Peter Pan, a boyish but genderqueer boy-lover. Anybodys beams at Ice when, having taken over leadership of the Jets (one of two all-male youth gangs in the musical), he tacitly accepts them into the gang and calls them “buddy boy.” The stage directions assert then that Anybodys “has fallen in love” (Lehman 2003: 108); and in response to being called “buddy boy,” they call Ice “Daddy-O” (107). In this crucial moment of subject formation, Anybodys is thus positioned as a boy in love with an older boy, while Ice is positioned [End Page 7] as in a triangulate relationship with both the “boy” Anybodys and his female sexual partner, Velma. Both of these subject positions reproduce aspects of choreographer Jerome Robbins’s own sexuality. A dance musical conceived and choreographed by Robbins and scored by Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story is a classic of American musical theater. The original Broadway production premiered in 1957; its 1961 film version garnered eleven Academy Award nominations and won ten, including Best Picture. A retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the film has entered our national consciousness as a cautionary tale about ethnic hatred.1 Dance scholars Anna B. Scott, Rachel Duerden, and Bonnie Rowell have described how an imaginary of ethnic difference structures much of the choreography (Scott 2010: 83; Duerden and Rowell 2013: 135). But Jerome Robbins intended the musical as a complex portrait of a subversive youth culture, undermining Cold War truisms about the importance of “responsible adulthood” and a family-centered social structure (Zhu and Belgrad 2017). In this context, its choreography offers a subtle subversion of Cold War America’s ideological investment in heteronormative sexuality, challenging the general belief that gender conformity and heterosexual romance were the necessary signs of social health and personal well-being. As a method of cultural analysis, dance studies has demonstrated a unique ability to contribute to the emerging interpretive “revolution from below”: a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural texts based on a recovery of the embodied subject as the center of meaning making (Altieri 2003; McCormack 2014). Dance studies investigates bodily orientations and articulations as essential to how human beings create and decipher meaning. Recently, the field has seen an explosion of the conventional notions of “dance” and “choreography,” broadening these terms to include all moves and postures that constitute deliberately designed action (Gere 2004: 9). Correspondingly, in her book Queer Phenomenology, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed explores the implications of “orientation” as a descriptor of “how we come to find our way” in the world (Ahmed 2006). Ahmed uses this term to entangle movement styles with the issue of sexuality, suggesting that “if orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit space” (Ahmed 2006: 1–2). Conceptualizing meaning-making as a bodily experience demands by implication a close attention to the evocation and display of affect in works of art. Affect is the physiological...