ABSTRACT

What do bodies know? And how do we integrate such knowledges into our scholarly work? In this chapter, I introduce performative inquiry as a critical approach to embodied knowledge production and then, using the minuet-the most popular eighteenth-century dance form-as a case study, I reflect on the potential of historical dance, as bodily performance practice, to illuminate our understanding of the ways that gender, class and ethnicity are both influenced by and mapped onto social spaces. I argue that our understanding of the environment is shaped by the way that we physically and physiologically move through space, and further, suggest that the way that we move is shaped by our embodiment, by the way that socially-constructed notions of sex, gender, class, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality inform our experiences of our bodily selves. Operating from the perspectives of bodily movement and embodied knowl-

edge-knowledge that is, as the editors of this collection observe, “felt rather than seen” (p. 5)—can open new windows into historical inquiry, windows that are otherwise inaccessible through more traditional text-based archival methods. Indeed, as Kirby has argued, “the meat of the body is thinking material” (Kirby 2009, p. 221). The body’s materiality-its flesh, muscles, tendons, fat, bones, and guts-offers an ideal site to consider the ‘nature’ of humans.