One part of Longhurst's 'Corporeographies' that really struck a chord with me was the discussion of "genderizing" the rational as masculine and the "Other" as feminine. That is, the idea that contained, orderly and complete form is masculine, whereas femininity connotes messiness, passion and incompleteness.
I thought immediately of da Vinci's Vitruvian man and the structure of the anatomy and containment of the body within the boundaries drawn. In art, men of most desired form are almost always depicted in an almost rigid way -- chiseled features, deliberate stance -- while women have always been presented with more organic forms and undefined boundaries.
Positive and negative connotations aside, this difference in male and female physique can be seen in many forms of dance. Men tend to rely more on the rhythm, power and straight lines while women draw on fluidity and curvature with moves that don't necessarily illustrate the beat of the song.
Susan Bordo talks about a similar dynamic - the male body, including the gaze of the male, as "strong" - in her work on the male body in advertising.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that the male=rhythmic/female=fluid, in terms of dance, necessarily holds up, cross-culturally, or trans-historically. In much modern dance, such gendering seems to be avoided; we could even ask, for example, if the males were doing different types of movements than the females in Streb's performance at Annenberg. Were they?
And I wonder how we might think of this in terms of music. Are "driving," "percussive" pieces thought of as "masculine," while legato, fluid pieces thought of as "feminine"? Susan McClary investigates this in her work on Western symphonic music, where the first and second themes in sonata form are (were) often unambiguously termed "masculine" and "feminine." How does rock fit into this? Hip-hop/rap? Singer-songwriters? Etc., etc.?