Still Not About Sex — Vernacular Dance, Attention, Affect, and Self-Organization

Scientists and lay-people frequently buy into the trope that vernacular dance is primarily an evolutionary mechanism for sexual selection. I argue against the dance-as-sexual-selection hypothesis; the structure of attention, affect, and agency in dance are all geared towards experiences of the collective, not the identification of single individuals. I call into question several problematic assumptions about dance in the sexual selection literature and point to flawed experimental designs. Using dynamic systems, phenomenological evidence, and embodied cognition, I argue that vernacular dance is more fundamentally about a sense of collectivity.