Body to Body: Perceptions of Touch and Dance in an American University Setting

Abstract

The following research report is an analysis of my undergraduate Honors research conducted throughout the span of my final four semesters at Texas Christian University. The report examines the history of touch in dance and analyzes data collected from surveys that university students filled out after watching a brief dance video. The video featured three couples (two men, two women, and a man and woman) performing the same duet one after another. I compiled the survey responses in order to infer patterns related to how the university students interpreted touch and dance with regard to sexuality and religion. The main trends that emerged from the data are: an overall trend for the heterosexual duet to be interpreted as the most sensual of the three duets; the connection between religious backgrounds and the amount that the duets were interpreted as sensual; a person's own sexuality tended to indicate whether they saw the video through a heteronormative lens; respondents indicated that they were more comfortable seeing dancers touch than they were seeing general strangers touch in public; the implied nature of wording within survey questions related to how respondents reported their interpretations of the duets. The report concludes by describing the connections between the results of this study and previous research regarding touch, sexuality, religion, and dance, and explaining the importance of this study for further researchers in multiple fields of academic study.