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.     

The presence of absence: Beyond the “great goddess” in Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series

Ann Liv Young's The Bagwell in Me, which premiered at The Kitchen in NYC, 2008, continues this experimental dance-theater artist's characteristically brutal, anatomizing exposure of the performers’ bodies through both sexual and violent narratives. This analysis examines how Young's construction of a certain type of subject on the stage challenges the subjectivities of her audience members, provoking moments of potential eruption. By setting up the possibility of abjection through the ambivalent dynamic of attraction and repulsion, and bombarding the audience with tropes that engender a push toward Georges Bataille's concept of “radical formlessness,” I argue, Ann Liv Young's performance places notions of the stable subject – composed of a “whole” body that is coherently organized and intelligibly coded in terms of sex, gender, sexuality and race – into question. Not only will this analysis explore how viewing oral sex as choreography speaks to Bataille's discussion of radical formlessness through decontextualization and the maddening effects of staring at the sun, but it will also interrogate how the same strategy of radical formlessness could have entirely different performative effects regarding the threat of bodily coherence and taxonomy within the narrative of historical racial violence.     

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.     

Cross way cross civil war chronicles,part iii

What possibilities might melancholia offer for a queer ethics, and what might it mean to perform such an ethics onstage? In this essay the author analyzes mobile figurations of U.S. nationalism, violence, and visuality as theorized in the work of contemporary queer chorographers Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy. The author suggests that Jones's 1989 Untitled and Hennessy's 2006 Sol Niger evidence shifts in racialized sexuality and empire from the 1980s to the War on Terror, even as they both mark convergences between geopolitics and biopolitics. Reading these works together – despite their markedly different aesthetics and tones – elucidates a queer ethics rooted in and capable of contending with our contemporary political moment of war and U.S. empire building. Further, these works model how dance and other embodied, collective practices can engender what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performances” or possibilities for critique and transformation rooted in moving social bodies.     

A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee

This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj's gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki's hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.     

Rhythms of resurrection: The comebacks of Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) had one of the first and longest careers as a professional modern dancer. At age 62, she embarked on a “comeback” that lasted nearly three decades, appearing on stage and screen in the dances that had made her an international star earlier in her career. This essay examines the relationship between her well-known “Orientalism,” her feminism, her spirituality, and her perspective on aging and ageism. In particular, it brings into relief her innovative efforts to redefine dance as a feminist project at the intersection of aging and modern dance history. St. Denis converted “oriental tradition” into a feminist dance praxis, thus, staking a claim for the aging dancer under the banner of feminist politics.     

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.     

Ma Rainey’s phonograph

This essay engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenets of sound reproduction technology. Between 1923 and 1925 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and bodies and their conflicted forms of capture andembodiment through sonic technologies. I think about how black sounds and bodies have been rendered as documentary objects within sonic and visual performance contexts and how this history is both referenced and complicated in Ma Rainey’s performances. I argue further that Rainey’s performance illustrates how sonic technologies always require, what I term black documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. To this end I illustrate how reducing black art to an evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological construction. In addition to analyzing Rainey’s performance I briefly engage the contemporaneous visual culture of the blues as a means to trace the legacy of black documentary embodiment within a longer visual-sonic tradition.     

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.     

Authenticity of self‐expression: Reinterpretation of female independence through the writings of simone de beauvoir

Based on the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper reinterprets the concepts of “dependency” and “independence” with respect to women's experiences. De Beauvoir, considered a strong and independent woman, continuously struggled for emotional independence, a struggle which she conceived as being against the need that drove her “impetuously toward another person”. However, a careful examination of de Beauvoir's inner voice as it is reflected in the subtext of her autobiographical writings, suggests that her true struggle revolves around a desire for authentic expression of her feelings and needs — rather than for separation from others.

As an adolescent de Beauvoir was caught between the expectations of her parents and her own needs, remaining the “dutiful daughter” at the expense of being false to her own self. This pattern of dependency reappears in her adult life, when she seems to be incapable of validating her feelings of jealousy and anger in her relationship with Sartre. Her means of coping with this problem is by giving it a literary expression, hence, she seems to gain a sense of freedom and independence by giving her repressed feelings an authentic outlet.

The re‐reading of de Beauvoir's autobiography in a new light of feminist criticism reveals a concept of dependency different from the need to rely on, receive help from, and be influenced by another. When one examines the meanings of dependency and independence through the female language of connectedness and women's values of care and involvement, the essential meaning of dependency shifts from the lack of self‐reliance to suppression of self‐expression, and from struggles for separation to struggles for one's personal truth and for authenticity in one's relations with others.     

Conversations with Lil: A play with Alzheimer's in five scenes and a couple of phone calls

Editors’ note – Elinor Fuchs's family memoir, Making an Exit, the story of her mother Lillian's unusual career and later memory loss, was published in 2005. Since that time Elinor has been invited to speak before many different groups on her experience as a caregiver. On occasion, instead of a talk, she has offered a performance, spliced together from the fragments of conversation she taped with her mother over several years. In these conference performances, Elinor performs both her own words and her mother's, and reads all notes, scene titles, asides, and “stage directions.”     

White Women. White Nation. White Cosmopolitanism: Swedish Migration between the National and the Global

Emerging from the concepts of white cosmopolitanism and white cosmopolitan femininity, this article analyses “cosmopolitan narratives” of Swedish migrant women who lived abroad for an extended period and eventually returned to Sweden. Based on eight months’ ethnographic work, including 46 in-depth interviews with migrants who had returned in Sweden, the article explores how national boundaries are both maintained and traversed in the construction of a “world citizen”. It is argued that the women’s self-identification with a cosmopolitan ethos is structured by whiteness, nationality, and class that grants uninterrupted mobility and “worldliness”. As symbolic bearers of the Swedish nation, national ideals act on the white women’s bodies internationally, in ways that both uphold and re-inscribe the nation into the global. Thus, apart from obscuring global inequalities, white cosmopolitan femininity is imbricated in both national and global politics as a place where global structures reconnect with the white nation, thereby enabling Swedish migrants to re-install themselves into contemporary global settings as self-defined cosmopolitan subjects     

Jesusa Rodriguez: An inconvenient woman

For the symposium “Where Is Ana Mendieta,” I discussed and projected PowerPoint images, starting with my 1963 Eye Body – 36 Transformative Actions as a precedent for the explicit, artist body as both image and image-maker. This work, as well as Body Collage, Water Light/Water Needle and Meat Joy, provided a practice for Ana's intensive submersion with her body as subject. Images of our parallel affinities within natural forms and materials were shown, establishing our urgent permissions to regard the sensory, psychic realms in which our bodies manifested energy against cultural constrictions and prohibitions. Also shown was my homage Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta inspired by a dream instruction sent by Ana shortly after her death.     

The dreaded body: disgust and the production of “appropriate” femininity

While some literature has explored women’s feelings about social identities like fatness, race, disability, queerness, and aging, little research has examined, from an intersectional perspective, how women construct a dreaded or viscerally disgusting body and how this produces “appropriate” femininity. This paper utilized thematic analysis of qualitative data from a community sample of 20 US women (mean age = 34, SD = 13.35) to illuminate how women imagined a body they dreaded. Responses indicated that defective femininity, having “freak” body parts, fear of excessiveness, loathing a particular person’s body, and language of smelliness and disgust all appeared, weaving together women’s fears about fatness, dark skin, and becoming old or disabled. Implications incorporating visceral disgust to examinations of body image, and the intersectional foundations of women’s dreaded selves, were discussed. Further, imagining “Other” bodies may produce especially vivid narratives around social biases and internalized oppression.     

Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth Century

Elsa Lanchester (1902–86) is best known today as a character actress in Hollywood, who played the title role in the Bride of Frankenstein. Less well known is her remarkable early life in Britain where she participated in the avant-garde through dance, theatre, film and other forms of performance. This article explores Lanchester's world before her marriage to the actor Charles Laughton in 1929 to investigate aspects of bohemian culture in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lanchester's artistic nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, on the edges of London's West End. Bohemianism, modern dance and musical comedy opened up new identities and spaces for female self-exploration.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.