In this stark statement, Marx announces game over for the commons. After four hundred years of land enclosures and privatization, the European working class had lost not only physical access to common lands, but also the “very memory” of the commons as a basic right and co-existential truth. He thus draws a distinction between the commons as a physical site and the sensibility associated with its collective use—call it commons-sense. To lose the physical commons is to incite struggle—as occurred across centuries of peasant revolt in Europe. But to lose commons-sense, Marx implies, is to eclipse from the imagination the very possibility of a collective way of organizing our lives.

This essay seeks to limn the vulnerabilities of partnering in competitive ballroom dancing. It argues that for racialized and gendered subjects who fall beyond dancesport’s normative range of aesthetic legibility, lead and follow becomes an especially fraught—yet potentially reparative—mode of relation. It brings sustained ethnographic focus to the Asian American amateur dancesport community in New York City, which not only represents a growing presence in a predominantly white industry, but unsettles its racially charged conventions of skill, prestige, beauty, and belonging. From this position, it maps a field of vulnerable relations: between Asian American amateurs and the dancesport industry, in which they remain largely marginal and illegible figures, but also between Asian American male leads and female follows. Building on partner dance scholarship that complicates assumptions about lead and follow as a one-way flow of power, it treats the embodied mechanics of dancesport partnering as a dialogic practice of mutual vulnerability, in which both dancers effectively lead and follow each other. It also attends to the aesthetic, pedagogical, and social rules that put pressure on competitive couples—demanding resilience, even detachment, at the expense of that mutual vulnerability. In parsing what is contradictory, even compromising, about Asian American dancesport practice, this essay theorizes lead and follow as a mode of relation that involves opening ourselves up, and remaining open, to risk—but also, to the possibility of exquisite moments that can only be co-created.

Every year, beginning on Memorial Day, a group of 35 to 851 activists walk from Sásabe, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona, USA over eight days, through the arid, rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert. They walk through soaring desert temperatures, along dirt roads and highways, enduring hot spots, blisters, and leg cramps, as shade gradually disappears with little to block the rising sun. At night, walkers sleep in tents or on tarps. Participants carry small white crosses emblazoned with the names and ages at death of migrants who perished while trying to complete a perilous journey undetected. Some are labeled “Deconocido/a” (Unknown) to memorialize someone whose remains have not yet been identified. Periodically, over the course of each day’s journey, participants conduct a role call in honor of the dead, with each walker reciting the name of the person they commemorate as the group responds with the word “¡Presente!” to “indicate that the life and death of the migrant whose name was read is recognized and witnessed” (Mankel 2021: 104). Participants undertake this journey to highlight the scale of death in the desert and its individual ramifications.2

Nawa Kōhei’s gallery shows mounted under the title Vessel (2016-19) used techniques of bodily distortion to explore what Nawa called “the idea of ‘liquefying’ and ‘dissolving’” the human body as “represented by the distinctive ‘headless’ pose”—or what the Surrealist Georges Bataille christened in 1936 “the acéphale” (Nawa et al. Arario; Jalet et al. 2019; Woo-hyun 2019). Christine Chiu’s review of the gallery exhibition described how: