ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the form of a ‘pas de deux’ between its two authors—who are, amongst other things, a philosopher and a former ballet dancer. It is a dialogue that becomes multivocal: opening out to involve and incorporate a range of other voices including Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler and Barbara Christian. Starting with a consideration of ‘the leap’ as a gesture in thought belonging both to dance and philosophy, this textual dance moves across notions of iterability, performativity and gender in order to ask: If the body is written into the corpus of literature and philosophy by Irigaray and Cixous, does dance write the body into space such that it rearranges how we see it, how we feel it, how we know it? Engaging with critiques of French feminism by feminists of colour like Christian, the text stages a dialogue between the historical iterations of écriture féminine and contemporary permutations of performative writing.
