Embodying difference : issues in dance and cultural studies / Cultural studies and dance history / Reinstating corporeality : feminism and body politics / "The story is told as a history of the body" : strategies of mimesis in the work of Irigaray and Bausch / Classical ballet : a discourse of difference / Ballet as ideology : Giselle, Act 2 / Dancing the Orient for England : Maud Allan's The vision of Salome / The female dancer and the male gaze : feminist critiques of early modern dance / Some thoughts on choreographing history / Auto-body stories : Blondell Cummings and autobiography in dance / Dance naratives and fantasies of achievement / Dancing bodies / Spectacle and dancing bodies that matter : or, If it don't fit, don't force it / Sense, meaning, and perception in three dance cultures / Some notes on Yvonne Rainer, modernism, politics, emotion, performance, and the aftermath / Homogenized ballerinas / Dance ethnography and the limits of representation / Vodou, nationalism, and performance : the staging of folklore in mid-twentieth-century Haiti / Jane C. Desmond -- Norman Bryson -- Janet Wolff -- Susan Kozel -- Ann Daly -- Evan Alderson -- Amy Koritz -- Susan Manning -- Brenda Dixon Gottschild -- Ann Cooper Albright -- Angela McRobbie -- Susan Leigh Foster -- Anna Beatrice Scott -- Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull -- Mark Franko -- Marianne Goldberg -- Randy Martin -- Kate Ramsey.
"Dance, whether considered as an art form or embodied social practice, as product or process, is a prime subject for culturalal analysis. Yet only recently have studies of dance become concerned with the ideological, theoretical, and social meanings of dance practices, performances, and institutions. In Meaning in Motion, Jane C. Desmond brings together the work of critics who have ventured into the boundaries between dance and cultural studies, and thus maps a little-known and rarely explored critical site." "Writing from a broad range of perspectives, contributors from disciplines as varied as art history and anthropology, dance history and political science, philosophy and women's studies chart the questions and challenges that mark this site. How does dance enact or rework social categories of identity? How do meanings change as dance styles cross borders of race, nationality, or class?. How do we talk about materiality and motion, sensation and expressivity, kinesthetics and ideology? The authors engage these issues in a variety of contexts: from popular social dances to experimentation of the avant-garde; from nineteenth-century ballet and contemporary Afro-Brazilian Carnival dance to hip hop, the dance hall, and film; from the nationalist politics of folk dances to the feminist philosophies of modern dance. Giving definition to a new field of study, Meaning in Motion broadens the scope of dance analysis and extends to cultural studies new ways of approaching matters of embodiment, identity, and representation."--Jacket.