Dancing Women : Female Bodies on Stage

Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity.

Using an interpretive strategy different from that of other feminist dance historians, who have stressed either victimisation or celebration of women, Banes finds a much more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities.