ABSTRACT
Dance, as an academic discipline, is in a good position to accommodate feminist problematics in the writing of dance history. Feminism theorizes culture from woman’s point of view, and it is women who constitute the majority of practitioners within western theatre dance. Both feminism, as a politics, and dance, as a cultural practice, share a concern with the body. For feminists the body is understood as the primary site of social production and inscription (Grosz 1987), whereas for dance it is its capacity for movement which is the central concern. As a feminist dance scholar I speak from the dance department at the University of Surrey, whose very existence has depended upon the committed endeavours of women, and it is women who in the main continue to develop the expanding field of dance research. Yet dance remains on the margins of feminist critical studies in the arts and feminist debates about culture have not yet been taken up in a comprehensive way within dance studies. This is despite the fact that it seems increasingly incongruous for dance and feminism to ignore each other given the possibilities which new analyses of ideology, representation and social relations bring to the study of the dancing body (Wolff in Adair 1992).
