Toeing the Line: The Gender Politics of Pointe Shoes

Pointe shoes are iconic and emblematic of ballet. But who decides who gets to wear them? 

Photo credit: Sarah Cecilia Bukowski, 2017

[ Image description: a pile of pink pointe shoes and pink ribbons arranged haphazardly against a light-colored wood floor. ]

This is the third installment of our series on gender in ballet. If you haven’t had a chance, please take a look at the previous two articles, linked by title here:

January 2021: Of Girls and Men: Ballet’s Gender Binary Problem

February 2021: Teaching the Binary: The Outsized Role of Gender in Ballet Training

All caught up? *high five* All right, let’s proceed.

So, the tricky thing about pointe shoes is that you’re either “on the box” (perched atop the scant square inch or two of the shoe’s flat tip) or “off the box” (doing quite literally anything else). There’s no middle ground, no wiggle room, no “almost.” In fact, the edge of the box is a notoriously dangerous place. Just ask any of the tragically floor-bound pointe shoe-wearers in @biscuitballerina’s #fallingfriday compilations! The box quite often eludes us.

Faceplants aside, pointework is an exercise in absolutes. Dancing en pointe takes years of specialized training and a substantial amount of pain and dedication. The shoes themselves have a disturbing capacity to define “right” and “wrong” by rigid technical and aesthetic standards (just ask our determined friends over at @modelsdoingballet). And in the ballet world it seems that when it comes to who can or “should” wear pointe shoes, the same absolutes apply: women must, men may not. With few exceptions, this rule holds fast in the vast majority of ballet schools and companies. The thing is, gender is anything but absolute. Dancers of all genders should have the right to choose the footwear that best represents their vision of themselves in ballet. 

So let’s dig into this. As dancers push against ballet’s rigid gender binary, what does the future hold for pointe shoes?

There’s a growing movement to empower a wider expression of gender en pointe, and there are many approaches to exploding binary gender norms in this rarefied art of putting all of one’s weight on the tips of one’s toes. From the drag-inflected trailblazing of the Ballet Trockadero in the 1970’s to the likes of the Bay Area’s own Ballet 22 and American Ballet Theatre principal dancer James Whiteside’s “WTF” music video (among many others), new visions of pointework are becoming more and more mainstream. And I’m here for all of it. Anyone who wants to dance en pointe should have the access and opportunity to put in the time, effort, and care to train responsibly and present themselves to the world as a whole and capable pointe-prancing person.

So here’s where it gets sticky: changing the idea of who can dance en pointe disrupts the structure of ballet entirely. Tradition dictates: pointe = ballet = ballerina = woman = beauty. These days I’m heartened to see people of all genders working to change that simplistic non-equation by empowering themselves to put on pointe shoes. But what happens when you feel the most empowering thing to do is to take them off?

My own 26-year relationship to pointe shoes is, in a word, complicated. I can vividly recall exactly where I was standing and what I was feeling in my first pointe class at nine years old. I remember every lost toenail, sprained ankle, and long night of sewing from my teens into my thirties. I still keep a well-worn pair stashed at the gym (a.k.a. my living room) and a secret stack of shiny pink ones in their branded zip-top bags on the highest shelf of my coat closet. I think I’ll always have them. These shoes have quite literally shaped me; my body is riddled with the subtle marks they’ve left behind, some only a fellow veteran might recognize.

In 2017 I made the conscious decision to, as it were, step off the box. I even choreographed a ritualistic one-woman show as a kind of therapy or tribute to this monumental decision. One year prior I had made a grateful break from classical ballet, and I was going through a tumultuous knee injury and deep life changes. As I recovered and rediscovered my dancing body through the loving guidance of the late San Francisco somatic ballet icon Augusta Moore, I began to seriously examine the full physical and psycho-emotional implications of dancing en pointe. And as I turned my life in new directions, my self expression changed. I exchanged cocktail dresses for jumpsuits, high heels for boots, and salon visits for a set of clippers and a mirror in my bathtub. Each of these changes is an expression of who I am and what I feel to be true inside me. My dancing resides deep inside and all throughout me, so more than anything, my dancing should reflect just that: me.

So what changed? I had begun to feel that when I put on pointe shoes I was bound and beholden to them in ways that didn’t feel quite right. The shoes determined so much about what the rest of my body could be and do, for better and for worse. Their unique design allowed me to slide and spin and float with ethereal grace and power, my legs tapered sharply into gleaming muscular weapons. For many wonderful dancing years my pointe shoes felt like articulate extensions of my body and the tools of a fascinating, artful science. But more and more I was running up against their limitations: the disconnection from the floor in their hard, tight confines, the unnaturally altered chains of force and gravity wearing on my joints, and the way they kept me hyper-conscious of my perceived physical shortcomings in relation to the hyper-feminine aesthetic and hyperextended arches of the “ballerina.” I wanted to find out who I could be as a ballet dancer without them.

What I found out instead was that--surprise!--I could no longer be considered a ballet dancer. Even contemporary ballet companies shut their doors to me with excuses like this: “our Artistic Director views pointe simply as an extra ‘tool’ that can be called for if the right creative opportunity arises.” There was no acknowledgment whatsoever of my questioning why that tool should be wielded exclusively and uniformly by women. So did that make me a modern dancer, then? Modern dance companies didn’t quite know what to do with my defiant body strangely marked by ballet’s kinesthetic signature. I even had one choreographer dismiss me by saying she “didn’t have time to retrain a ballet dancer.” I felt my career sputtering to a confused and frustrating stall, so I changed gears yet again. Since the onset of the pandemic and yet another major life shift, I’m taking time to decide how I want the dance inside me to speak into the world. My body speaks many languages, and in the language of ballet, pointe is just one dialect.

Perhaps because of this long and winding personal pointe odyssey, I’m hyper-attuned to the deployment of pointe shoes in both mainstream ballet and boundary-pushing projects. What I find myself wanting most is a focus on not just pointe shoes’ empowered presence, but also their empowered absence. Every dancer deserves the chance to choose how they envision and train their body in ballet. People of all genders should receive full support in their choice to wear or decline to wear pointe shoes. Only then can ballet move fully into the present and build its future from the ground--and the shoe--up.

I know I’m not the only dancer with a complicated relationship with this iconic footwear. Many aspects of identity factor into any one dancer’s experience in this art form. My hope is that through this platform we can continue to explore ballet’s complex social and cultural dynamics through an intersectional lens focused on equity and justice. And I invite you to join! Please leave a comment or get in touch: admin@asimagery.org.