Val Meneau

Val Meneau (they/sie/elle) is a French trans non-binary multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, and activist. They currently work as a guest researcher at the Department for Diversity Research of the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a third-party fund. Val Meneau has received a two-year Schrödinger mobility grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and will be at the institute until the end of 2027.
They completed their PhD with distinction in dance studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria, for which they have received a scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and two awards, from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the University of Salzburg. Their first book, DanceSport’s Economy of Desire, is based on their PhD research and was published by Bloomsbury in 2026. They have held positions in sociology, political sciences, dance studies, and gender studies at the universities of Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg. Their research focuses on body and sexual politics at the intersection between gender, queer, and critical dance studies. Furthermore, Val co-authors the digital publication www.queeringdancesport.com, a science-to-public project funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

In their current project, they work to investigate how women and queer people are affected by and respond to societal norms surrounding gender and sexuality in competitive ballroom dancing, also known as DanceSport. The goals of this research are:
1) To understand the needs of female and queer dancers in DanceSport, and
2) To create new policies, discourses and practices to protect these groups and tackle exclusion and violence.

This project shines a spotlight on ways in which queer and female dancers already fight back and go against the grain in their everyday experiences in the DanceSport world. It also sets out ways to make the DanceSport world safer and more welcoming for them. This project looks at how female and queer dancers deal with the barriers they face, and how policies can help or stop them. It does this by studying how queer and female dancers navigate the balance between their bodily autonomy and their access to higher ranks in DanceSport.