Dance, gender, and culture

the long version

This unique collection of essays, written specially for this volume, seeks to explore the possibilities of a number of ways in which dance and gender intersect within particular cultural contexts. What makes the book special is its multidisciplinary focus with contributions from a variety of sources such as cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, dance studies, film studies and journalism. The contributors draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches such as feminism, psychoanalysis, ethnography, film theory and subcultural theory. These perspectives are used to explore aspects of the relation between dance and gender in a range of cultural contexts, from social and disco dance to performance dance, to the Hollywood musical and to dances from different cultures. The collection clearly demonstrates that dance can provide a rich resource for subject areas like sociology, cultural studies and feminism, which have all but ignored it, and it also shows that dance scholarship can benefit from the insights that these more established disciplines have to offer.