ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the body in performance through photography, women’s struggle for political agency and through narratives of degeneration, which gained momentum from the late nineteenth century. From the ways in which developments in photography offered female performers a means to both re-configure and circulate images of their bodies at work, to sketches and plays about suffragettes and performances of the body in degenerate spaces like night clubs, the chapter provides a critical overview of the ways in which performance cultures of the period reconfigured representations of the body and its signifying potential in public and private space.
