ABSTRACT
Displacing causation and agency, Foucault studied instead the conditions of possibility for relations and networks that framed social existence. In The Order if Things and other works, he scrutinized the constitution of knowledge, the circulation of power, and the designation of sameness and difference (Gordon 1980:
229-59). Foucault's reorientation of inquiry was liberating in several respects, and it intersected with other poststructuralist concerns. It abetted new interest in matters of representation - how representation worked, how its products circulated, how its operation participated in relations of domination and subordination. Interest in representation proved especially beneficial to studies that analyzed dance practices as means through which people presented and interpreted themselves, to themselves. Jane Desmond's "Dancing out the Difference" (1991), for example, read Ruth St Denis's dance-drama Radha for its orientalizing effects. Susan Manning's "Black Voices, White Bodies" (1998) parsed the metaphorical minstrelsy by which white women's modern dancing bodies on the concert stage stood in for absented African Americans. Foucault's redirection of inquiry also contributed to a larger reconsideration by poststructuralist writers, such as Judith Butler (1988), of the unitary, authentic self, and subjectivity. Such reconceptualization has proposed the self and subjectivity to be multiple, even fragmentary, and as constituted in several and varied kinds of relationships. This vein of theory has helped dance scholars to show ways in which performance and compositional strategies have troubled and challenged sanctioned modes for embodying cultural characteristics such as gender roles, the sense of belonging to a nation, and class position. Mark Franko's "Where He Danced", for instance, considered the potential of Kazuo Ohno's butoh work Suiren to provide an alternative registration of maleness via cross-dressing conceptualized as "through dressing," suggesting a model of gender performance that allows gender attributes to recombine "at uneven intervals and to unequal degrees" (Franko 1995: 107).
