American Dance Pioneer Martha Graham and the Ghosts of Feminism

Abstract: The essay explores the mutual haunting between American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and feminism. This troubling arises from the confusion between what can be considered the predominantly feminist character of Graham's life and work coupled with Graham's outright rejection of a feminist consciousness. The author suggests that this ambivalent situation allows for an ever increasing complex but fruitful discussion of Graham's possible feminist identifications and their effects. The essay first argues for the performanative force of ‘doing’ a feminist identity as a foil for Graham's public written reputation of feminism. It then charts both the changing cultural and social beliefs of and about women in the twentieth century alongside Graham's specific geographical, social, cultural and historical placement in that history and its possible impact on her processes of identification. The essay then makes a close contextual reading of one of Graham's works of the early 1930s, Primitive Mysteries (1931), to illustrate its radical conception of the female body both at the time of its premiere and over subsequent reconstructions. The author finishes by arguing that the question of Graham's feminism is an important one because it remains unanswered.     

Techniques of black male re/dress: corporeal drag and kinesthetic politics in the rebirth of Waacking/Punkin’

The improvisation-based dance Waacking/Punking developed in gay underground disco clubs of 1970s Los Angeles and circulated transnationally via television's landmark black music/dance show Soul Train. With almost all male progenitors passing during the early AIDS crisis, the culture was reborn in the 2000s to the transnational hip-hop/street dance arena, now a competition style dominated by nonblack cisgender females. While seeming to promote hetero-normative gender performance, learning the dance practice potentially queers movement norms through corporeal drag – techniques for trying on and refashioning movement that transform kinesthetic consciousness. At the same time, the obscure structural positioning of the black male figure associated with Waacking/Punking's historical context complicates and disorients gendered notions of power and racialized sexuality in its rebirth. This trans-methodological study centers experiences of black practitioners, drawing from first-person stories of pioneer and new generation dancers, as well as native ethnography and archival research. In subtle ways, Waacking practices redress black masculinity and question performing social inclusion under terms of a white patriarchal order – terms that suture blackness-to-pathology-to-violence. The erotic practice of Waacking/Punking may be understood as an embodied re-negotiation of hegemonic demands on gender and sexuality, made possible through its transmission of a black kinesthetic politics.     

“Object Lesson(s)”

This article reconstructs up an impromptu dance performed by Lavinia Baker, a survivor of mob violence and star of an anti-lynching performance revue, and reads it as the occasion for rethinking the performative dimensions of a seemingly familiar spectacle: lynching. As opposed to the familiar scene of the black corpse captured and circulated in photographs, the author argues that Lavinia's 1899 dance and the liveness of her performance – that is, its excess, disruptions, and improvisation – is instantiation of racial violence that strains against the putative framing of mob violence as a finite event that is amenable to documentation, capture, or narrativization. By pivoting a discussion of lynching on Lavinia Baker’s protean performance, this essay not only challenges the shape and structure of nineteenth-century anti-black terror, but also demands that we (re) turn to a deceptively simple question that animates Scenes of Subjection: what does racial violence look like?     

Surpassing the word: Aileen Wuornos

This article explores the dynamics of Richard Move's drag performance of the late Martha Graham. Drag dance is remarkably self-aware as historiography, and it employs a rhetoric of bodies becoming other bodies: channeling, paying homage, re-embodying, reliving, being possessed. This article argues that drag dance has a historical project for dance history; specifically, that drag bodies can become a new medium through which aesthetic/kinetic histories are transmitted. In the case of Richard Move, the exaggeration and excess of the ageing Martha Graham become modalities that align with the ‘wrongness’ of his body. This is drag dance as a strategy of re-embodiment after the original body has been lost, and Richard Move presents his performance as a ‘haunting,’ much like the feeling Martha Graham describes as the result of a dancer's “first death,” when she watches someone else dance a role she had originated. Ballets like Graham's Lamentation and Cave of the Heart give Move the opportunity to portray Graham's struggle to continue to dance after this “first death,” using drag as a strategy to show up the eerie perfection of voice against the hollowness of the ageing dancer's body. Combining vaudeville and séance, moving from the restless gay “underworld” of the Meatpacking District to the right to presume himself the heir to the mother of modern dance, Richard Move first embodies and then moves beyond Susan Sontag's camp “etc etc” of Graham's self-performance.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

New woman meets Shakespeare woman: the struggle over the figure of Portia in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

Approaching the material from the perspective of cultural history, this essay explores the ways in which England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, witnessed considerable debate about the character of Portia from Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice. Feminists seized upon her appearance as a lawyer to argue for Shakespeare's advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation. Anti-feminists stressed the character's acquiescence to male control of her affections and her estate. Thus for many readers and viewers of the play concern about the status of the New Woman, civic maternalism, married women's property rights, and women in the professions, overrode their interest in the play as a text about Christians and Jews.     

Dancing Sita/reinventing a body disappeared: Notes from from Sita: Lament,fury, and a plea for peace

Richard Shannon's solo performance piece, The Lady of Burma, takes his audience inside Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment as she tells her story, moving between memory and the present. This excerpt begins as Suu Kyi has returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother, just as students begin to take to the streets against the ruling junta. In this sequence, Suu Kyi re-enacts the early violence subjected to the democracy activists (scenes that are eerily reminiscent of the spectacle of violence documented in Iran over the past year). As the scene continues, Suu Kyi describes her gradual engagement with the democracy activists, building to her famed address at the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda, in which Suu Kyi mobilized many of the nation's population in their struggle for liberation. The excerpt ends as Suu Kyi continues her struggle to lead the Burmese people to freedom through peaceful revolution, at the same time that her mother's life is coming to a close.     

Recovering hurston, reconsidering the choreographer

This article addresses the 'invisibilization' of Zora Neale Hurston's staging of black diasporic folk dance in the 1930s and queries the politics of restoring her to dance history. The recovery of Hurston's dance practice, I argue, provides an opportunity to re-assess the very terms we use to talk about dance as a form of cultural production and, more specifically, raises questions about who merits the designation 'choreographer.' At the same time, the article explores the risks of claiming for Hurston a status she did not seek—and one that was not available to her as a black woman—in her lifetime.     

Editorial

The whole of this issue of Australian Feminist Studies is devoted to the theme ‘Making us Modern’ guest-edited by Alison Ravenscroft. Modernity was, I have argued myself, an essential element of First-wave Feminism. The articles that Alison has brought togetherm show how mutually imbricated are questions raised by a later feminism and modernism. Alison has written her own introduction for this splendid issue. Accordingly, all that I need to do here is extraneous to it. I want to record our regret at the passing of Oriel Gray, one of Australia's first female playwrights. The Playwrights' Advisory Board voted her work, The Torrents, best play in 1955, alongside Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. She wrote a number of stage plays, worked for radio and television, and published an autobiography—Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman (Penguin Books)—in 1985. I want to record our sadness, too, at the death of Glen Tomasetti, singer, song-writer and author. She wrote poetry, articles and reviews, and two novels: Thoroughly Decent People (1976), and Man of Letters (1981). In the Australian Women's Movement she is best known for one of the protest songs that she wrote in the early 1970s; this one, ‘Don't Be Too Polite, Girls’ has often been played as a kind of Women's Movement anthem. As always, I owe thanks to everyone who contributes to this journal—authors, assessors, editorial advisory collective members, review editor Susan Sheridan, assistant editor Mary Lyons, and, for this issue, my very warm thanks to Alison Ravenscroft.     

The Archive Function

As Joan Wallach Scott warns in The Fantasy of Feminist History, the danger of depositing one's personal papers in an archive is that one's papers then become open to misinterpretation. In this article, Scott's fears are enacted in relation to another feminist theorist's archival collection, that of prominent Canadian scholar Barbara Godard who died before she could complete the process of donating her papers to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Drawing on personal memories and eclectic textual traces, this article attempts to recover Godard's theory of the archive—a theory she never fully articulated in her lifetime, despite dedicating much of her time and energy to collecting and preserving her own words and the words and papers of her students and collaborators.     

Doris Arnold: the making of a radio star, 1926–1939

ABSTRACT

Doris Arnold (1904–1967) was a BBC radio personality and the UK’s first female ‘Disc Jockey’. She produced and presented the gramophone record programme These you have Loved from 1938. Despite her fame, Arnold is oddly absent from broadcasting histories and little is known about her today. Hers was one of the best known ‘rags to riches’ narratives of the early BBC: a typist whose musical talent propelled her to stardom. This article explores Arnold’s rise to fame through a detailed evaluation of her personal staff files which expose a complexity of gendered issues including status, clothing and pay.     

Portraying history and heroism in Rebecca West's The sentinel

Rebecca West's early interest in the suffragette movement gives us a strong sense of her development as a writer and feminist thinker, as her feminist perspective shifts from impassioned and enthusiastic supporter of the suffragettes in her incomplete novel, The Sentinel, to the more measured assessments in her early journalism. This article discusses some of the ways in which the imagery, iconography and militant discourse of suffragette writing and public speaking shaped the imagination of the young Rebecca West. It also shows how her celebration of female heroism in The Sentinel, often conveyed through detailed depictions of the women she admired, creates a vivid and informed version of feminist history.     

Dreams by Day and Night: Kant,Freud and Ella Freeman Sharpe

Abstract: The poet and novelist Mathilde Blind (1841–96) is known to have been influenced by evolutionary theory, particularly in her epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889). However, critics have not yet noted the extent to which her depictions of the courtship plot in her less overtly evolutionary writings are indebted to Darwin's representations of animal mating rituals. Although Darwin's commentary on patterns of relationships in the animal world often reinforced stereotypes of masculine aggression and feminine coyness, feminist writers, including Blind, shifted the focus onto creatures, such as birds and spiders, whose mating behaviour disrupts these stereotypes. This article examines four pieces in which Blind re-imagines the courtship plot by applying imagery of other species to human relationships: her poems ‘The Song of the Willi’ (1871), The Heather on Fire (1886) and ‘The Teamster’ (1889), and her novel Tarantella (1885). By rewriting the courtship plot in this way, Blind contests the idea that middle-class gender relations are sanctioned by the natural world and highlights the variety of possible gender roles found in other species.     

When Art Does not Represent Life: Nogami Yaeko and the Marriage Question

Nogami Yaeko's (1885–1985) early works “Meian” (1906) and Machiko (1930) critique marriage customs by portraying New Women who challenge the status quo. Yet Nogami is not directly connected with marriage debates or the New Women. To explain this paradox, this article examines these two works, comparing their New Woman heroines with Nogami herself. I argue that it was precisely because Nogami's art did not represent her life that she was able to express her opinions on marriage without attracting the notoriety and unfavorable publicity experienced by those who lived and wrote as New Women.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

Results of a misspent youth: Joan Jett's performance of female masculinity

The article maps Joan Jett's performances from her days with the Runaways in the mid-1970s through her successful solo career in the 1980s to her recent affiliations with the riot grrrls in the 1990s. Unlike some critics, who, while acknowledging Jett's influence on generations of female rock performers, dismiss Jett as an inferior copy of male rock musicians, the author argues that Jett's various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity. The article explores how Jett's interest in punk enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre. It is further contended that as more spaces opened for women in the early 1990s, Jett's performances took a more aggressive stance on traditionally feminist issues and enabled her to use her sexuality as an offensive weapon.     

Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raichō Explore Alternatives

This article provides a case study of how maternal feminist ideas traveled across national and cultural boundaries in the early twentieth century. It briefly examines Swedish feminist Ellen Key's (1849–1926) ideas on love, marriage, and motherhood and then explores the impact these ideas had on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). Encountering Key's writings early in her career had a lasting impact on Raichō's thought, writing, and activism. It also shows how Raichō drew on the modern, universal aspects of Key's thought to promote women's rights and influence in an increasingly nationalistic Japan. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. —Ellen Key, Love and Marriage 3.     

Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging in The Players Come Again

Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.     

Borders,Conflict Zones,and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerini's important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerini's early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerini's insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.     

Ted Shawn’s Labor Symphony: aesthetic work and productive performance

Ted Shawn’s all-male modern dance company, Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, toured extensively throughout the United States from 1933 to 1939 with the explicit goal of making concert dance a legitimate career for men. Shawn trained his dancers and choreographed their performances with careful attention to theme and movement aesthetic, proffering a version of modern dance meant to counter prevailing cultural prohibitions against men dancing. One of the company’s early works, Labor Symphony (1934), depicts the evolution of work from field to factory while critiquing the equation of the male body with labor power within capitalist economic systems; it also presents itself as labor, countering modern preoccupations with bodies enervated through repetitive movement or sedentary work, and with alienation from community through overly individuated tasks. The dance exemplifies Shawn’s novel movement aesthetic while expanding notions of productive labor by placing work itself in the context of performance. Emphasizing its status as productive work for men, the four sections of Labor Symphony display the Men Dancers’ strength, agility, and musculature prominently, exposing the piece as both means and end: it produces both the dance itself and bodies capable of performing it, much as agricultural and manual labor offer both product and a body disciplined to produce it.