Gender aspects of naming in dance subculture

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of gender representation in the names of teams in modern dance competitions. The research material consists of 1260 names of teams that participated in the Project 818 dance championship held in Moscow in the period 2017–2019. The applied methods include semantic interpretation, observation, and ethnography of speech (interviews, surveys). The results of the study have shown that gender-neutral meanings prevail in the names of the teams as well as among the gender-labeled names, with the share of “female” names being higher than that of the “male” ones. It has also been revealed that there is no connection between the gender marking of the name and the actual composition of teams: men can member the teams with pronounced “female” names, and vice versa. At the same time, gender is not a determining parameter when choosing a team name: preference, as a rule, is given to the originality and sonority of the name rather than the inherent gender meanings.