Post-modern Performing Art - Essay Example

Running Head: POSTMODERN PERFORMING ART: CONTACT IMPROVISATION Post-modern Performing Art: Contact Improvisation [The [The Name of the Institution] Post-modern Performing Art: Contact Improvisation Introduction The postmodernists in turn reacted against the physicality and overt sensuality of Duncan and Graham. Copeland explains this reaction in terms of the feminism of the sixties and seventies, which "eyed the sexual revolution with considerable suspicion, fearful that it hadn't really liberated women, but had simply made them more available." (Copeland, 1990) Copeland acknowledges the divergence between Rainer's and Irigaray's positions, that is, the divergence between Rainer's suspicion of sensuality and Irigaray's celebration of physicality. Performing Art Speaking of dance as a performing art is, implicitly, appealing to a contrast between visual and performing arts (Urmson, 1976: p. 239). Such a contrast leads us naturally to two important points concerning the nature of the performing arts. First, in general, the idea of a performing art implies the possibility of a number of performances. Second, the work of art is encountered only when one attends a performance, for only then is the work instantiated. In particular, one is not confronted with a work of art when one confronts only a notated score or a film or video. The point here is that this contrast tells us something important about performing. In contrast to visual arts like painting and sculpture, which are atemporal, performing acts like dance take time, not just in the trivial sense that it takes time to see or experience them, but in the more profound sense that they centrally involve events, which are in the flow of time, occurring at a particular moment and so on. Moreover, visual arts are fixed, as it were, after their creation, whereas performing arts are inherently underdetermined by their creation: they must be brought into completeness-as the name suggests-by being performed. (Amy, 1995) And, this implies a different sense of the term 'interpretation', the aesthetic significance of which must be gauged. One feature of recognizing dance as a performing art is recognizing its evanescence. Once we accept the transience of dance in this sense, we must still acknowledge its permanence: that the very same dance can be re-performed at some later date. But that fact itself must be explained. And if we want to understand the performing arts a little better here, it is first necessary to say something about the arts more generally. The critic writes an interpretation of a work of art-a poem, a painting or a dance. These interpretations are centrally, often exclusively, verbal in character, even when they are interpretations of dance or music. We call these 'critic's interpretations'. Second, there is the interpretation of the performer in a performing art. The performer is irrelevant to what the work of art (in a performing art) means, although my earlier remarks may have tended in that direction. It is not as though something that could be interpreted by the critic is instead interpreted by the performer. Rather, whenever the critic confronts the work of art itself (rather than the score, say) he necessarily confronts something already interpreted by some performer, if this is a work in a performing art. Works in the performing arts come, as we have seen, with a label reading 'And now perform it'. The content of such a label is always relevant to the meaning of such-and-such a work of art. For only in performance is a token of that type-work available for criticism. This means that the performer's interpretation does not really constitute a level of interpretation at all. For one cannot confront the work of art except in this 'interpreted' form. So speaking of the dance/language analogy, and of the linguistic character of our understanding, emphasizes that the place at which the meanings of dances are most readily located is in discussions of those dances, that is to say, in the linguistic element which is the critic's interpretation. Moreover, even acknowledging a kinaesthetic 'sense' leaves unclear its possible relation to the meaning of dances. Since our knowledge of meaning for art works depends centrally on the recognition of formal significance for features of those works-and hence on the recognition of the features as formal features (as well as the location of the work within its category)-one might well wonder if a kinaesthetic sense, once established, could make much of a contribution to our knowledge or understanding of meaning for dances. The significance of such formal features is something that one learns and recognizes, and that means through our projective sensory modalities. One recognizes features as formal in the context of the whole entity, or at least some significant part of it; an observed feature of a system cannot be derived solely from the properties attributed to its constituents. Thus, for example, the fluidity of water is not at issue, although none of its molecules are liquid in this way. Yet kinaesthesis could not offer the perception of such 'emergent' features, for emergent properties are the domain of the projective sensory modalities. Only when this 'projectedness' is a possibility can one ascertain in perception more than the immediate sensory inputs. The contiguous modalities, then, offer at best narrowly sensory experience. As such, this lack, among other things, any temporal dimension, and that is crucial to the character of appreciation or understanding of any performing art such as dance (Urmson, 1976). Contact Improvisation Technique. If the Cunningham body is a jointed one, the body cultivated in contact improvisation is weighted and momentous. This technique, developed collaboratively in the early 1970s by Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson, and others, explores the body's relations to gravity and to other bodies which result from its ability to flow as a physical mass. Contact improvisation gained popularity rapidly in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s as an artistic and social movement. Its technique classes were complemented by frequent informal practice sessions known as "jams," which allowed dancers to learn from, perform for, and socialize with one another. Its lyrical athleticism has been incorporated into the movement style of many dance companies in the United States and also in Europe, where it offers one of the few alternatives to ballet training. Unlike any of the other techniques discussed here, contact improvisation sets parameters for how to move but does not designate a set vocabulary of movements for students to learn. Students explore through improvisation the movement territory established by the stylistic and technical rules of the form. Classes include practice at simple skills of weight transfer as well as opportunities to use them through improvisation with others. The teacher's guidance, like the students' participation, is based on an assessment of the needs of the moment. Rather than specifying a series of preconceived forms, both teacher and students must determine what movement is appropriate for the group at a given time. In this democratic, unpredictable, and highly physical situation, the dancer's self becomes immersed in the body, as it does for Cunningham. The body, however, is not invested with an ongoing identity: its definition is constantly renegotiated in the changing context of the improvised dance. Ideally, its strength should be sufficient to Dancing Bodies bear the weight of another; but even more important, it must manifest an ability to go with the flow. (Novack, 1987) Both contact improvisation and Duncan technique cast the teacher in the role of facilitator, and both ask students to appreciate and encourage one another. Each of these techniques embraces all participants in the class, whatever their age or level of expertise, as members of a community of dancers. In ballet, by contrast, the hierarchy of values evident in the levels of classes and companies, in the choreography itself, and in its viewers' responses all incite competition among students. Teachers, as they introduce the tradition's standards for success and rank the students' performance against them, embody the authority of the tradition's abstract ideals. Graham's technique, on the other hand, places dancers in competition with each other but also with themselves. Criteria for success revolve around the dancer's ability to perform fully Graham's vocabulary of movement, but the dancer is also asked to fuse inner motivation with physical form. The teacher encourages the student to measure this psychological and physical participation through comments that question one's commitment to discipline. Cunningham's technique, with its emphasis on composition, encourages dancers to interest themselves in making dance as well as in performing. Students take from class whatever insights may be relevant to their own careers as choreographers and dancers. The structure of authority developed in each class helps to connect the dancing body to its aesthetic project. Ballet's prescribed pairings of positions and steps, and its emphasis on outwardly rotated legs and arms, constructs a flexible, elegant, lifted body that displays the classical linear and aerial forms that are the hallmarks of that tradition. The teacher's concise directives place the student within that tradition. Duncan's walks and skips, different from the quotidian in their rhythm and quality, embody an ideal of naturalness. Their graceful, grounded litheness seeks to render the body transparent to the luminous inclinations of the soul. The teacher's enthusiasm and conviction help to incorporate the student into the dancing community. The restrained successive movements of Graham's contraction and release build a sinewy, tensile, dynamic body that symbolizes a self full of turbulent feelings and the struggle inherent in expressing those feelings. The teacher's intimation of the arduous training ahead warns students of their need for commitment as it summons them to the dance. (Novak, 1990) Cunningham's matter-of-fact inventory of the body's structural capabilities produces a lanky, intelligent, alert body that eloquently declaims its own physicality. Cunningham teachers tend to approach their students as junior colleagues, instructing them while preserving their autonomy as potential artists. Contact improvisation's athletic, fleet body realizes itself through the act of contact with others. Its teachers must consistently empower students with the ability to improvise an innovative and sensitive response to the collective gathering of dancers. Much more could be said about each of these techniques -- how each elaborates a set of relations among parts of the body, and among dancing bodies, and how each develops the body within a sonoral and architectural environment. Dance and Post-modern Theories Dance theorists and critics do not relish the idea of dance being appropriated by sociology and cultural studies. In much the same way as musicologists complain about how sociologists rarely talk about the music outside all the other social relations within which it is "packaged," dance critics dislike the thought of others trespassing on their terrain. (Paul , 1985) But dance comes to us packaged in the messy social contexts of consumer capitalism, class culture, and gender and race relations. Ballet is a form which occupies a specific position in the high arts and popular culture spectrum. It is the poor relative of opera, but like opera is increasingly marketed not for elite but for a mass market. On these grounds alone dance should be of great interest to the sociologist, and not just as a cultural product and a form of mass entertainment but also as a form which invites a participative response, speaking to and with the body. From one perspective, Copeland historicizes the relations between early modern dance, post-modern dance, and varieties of twentieth-century feminism. From another perspective, he reduces these relations according to a model that posits art as more reflective than productive of social relations. His concluding paragraph walks a fine line between contextualizing dance in its historical setting and assuming that dance mirrors its historical setting: Obviously, none of the choreography I've been discussing can, or should, be reduced purely and simply to its feminist dimensions. The aesthetic and political path that leads from Duncan to Rainer...is long, circuitous, and complicated. Feminism is one of many influences exerted on, and reflected in, these works. But the fact remains that modern and post-modern dance are probably the only art forms in which various stages of feminist thinking are literally embodied. (Copeland, 1990) Despite his disclaimer, Copeland ultimately does view dance as a reflection of its society and thus commits what some scholars label the fallacy of reflection theory. Like Copeland, Elizabeth Dempster presents broad contrasts between ballet, early modern dance, and post-modern dance in her essay "Women Writing the Body: Let's Watch a Little How She Dances." Unlike Copeland, however, she consciously rejects the assumptions of reflection theory and premises her argument on the observation that "social and political values are not simply placed or grafted onto a neutral body-object like so many old or new clothes. On the contrary, ideologies are systematically deposited and constructed on an anatomical plane, i.e., in the neuro-musculature of the dancer's body."( Dempster, 1995) Carrying through this claim, Dempster bases her analyses on the technical methods of the dance styles under discussion. Her argument sets up a clear opposition between classical ballet and post-modern dance. (Foster, 1985) "In the classical dance," Dempster writes, "the spectator is invited to gaze upon a distanced, ideal world where the female dancer is traced as sylph and cipher, a necessary absence."(Dempster, 1995) In contrast, "the body, and by extension 'the feminine,' in post-modern dance is unstable, fleeting, flickering, transient -- a subject of multiple representations." (Dempster, 1995) It is the shifting quality of the body and subject in post-modern dance that Dempster finds so liberating. Post-modern dance avoids such cooptation by defining itself not as a newly innovated dance vocabulary but as "an interrogation of language itself." (Dempster, 1995)Although in an endnote Dempster cites Susan Foster's distinction between resistive and reactionary modes of postmodernism, (Susan, 1985) her description of post-modern dance never becomes less than celebratory. She does not address the specific example Foster gives of reactionary postmodernism -- the dancing of Twyla Tharp. Indeed, her argument makes little reference to specific choreographers or specific works but remains an idealized description of post-modern dance sui generis. And she never resolves the question of the gender politics of early modern dance. If Martha Graham was largely responsible for the cooptation of the practice, then where does that leave Isadora Duncan Dempster ends her discussion of Duncan without being able to decide whether to place more weight on her historical significance or her theoretical incorrectness: Duncan's vision of the dance of the future presumes an unproblematic return to a body of untainted naturalness and to an essential purity which she believed was fundamental to women. To recognize that Duncan's vision is unrealizable and perhaps, from a 1980s perspective, in some degree complicit with the concept of "natural" sexual difference is not to deny the power of her rhetoric, nor to dismiss the considerable impact her dancing had upon audiences of her time. (Dempster, 1995) In "Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics" Janet Wolff echoes many of Dempster's judgments. Yet Wolff does not write primarily as a dance critic but rather as a feminist theorist and sociologist of art. She structures her essay as a review of recent literature on the body and proceeds to question which model of the body best serves a "feminist cultural politics." (Wolff, 1997) With impressive erudition, she summarizes the insights of Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hlne Cixous. For Wolff's purposes, none of the available models quite work, for all presuppose either a purely constructed body or an essentialised body, and she is looking for an alternate position that acknowledges the female body "as discursively and socially constructed and as currently experienced by women." (Wolff, 1997) This she finds in post-modern dance and in related modes of performance art, film, and visual art. Her essay concludes: Beginning from the lived experience of women in their currently constituted bodily identities -- identities which are real at the same time as being socially inscribed and discursively produced -- feminist artists and cultural workers can engage in the challenging and exhilarating task of simultaneously affirming those identities, questioning their origins and ideological functions, and working towards a non-patriarchal expression of gender and the body. (Wolff, 1997) The only piece of cultural studies analysis which intrudes into this area marked out by the dominance of taste and connoisseurship is Peter Wollen's essay. (Wollen, 1987) Wollen argues that while theorists of modernism are loath to admit it since ballet has always been regarded as a less important art, the Russian ballet directed by Diaghilev, choreographed by Fokine, and with stage sets by Leon Bakst was enormously influential in the uneasy lurch which was made in the early years of the century toward a modernist aesthetic. By documenting the central importance of Diaghilev, and the way in which his most popular ballet, Scheherazade, looked to the Orient as a way of unsettling sexual and cultural mores, Wollen reinstates ballet as a crucial vehicle for the expression of radical ideas. The Russian ballet was poised between the old and the new order, and its decadence and excess accounted for what was an unfair marginalization in the writing of modernist history. (Cahm, 1976) Ballet is an activity favoured within the middle and lower middle classes while disco dancing is more likely to be linked with working-class girls. Ballet, however, occupies an uncertain place in middleclass culture. It does not carry the same value as classical music. Proficiency in music and knowledge of the great composers carries greater cultural weight than knowledge of dance and proficiency on points. The "cultural capital" of music holds the pupil in much better stead than that acquired in dance. (Pierre, 1984) Pupils are encouraged to join the school orchestra while those who want to dance will rarely find a school which takes dance (as a gender-specific subject) as seriously as it does music. Sociology of dance would have to consider this cultural ambivalence. The middle-class preference for music reflects the connotations dance carries as a pleasure of the body rather than of the mind. And because dance is also a popular leisure activity where the female body has been allowed to break free of the constraints of modesty, dance has aroused anxiety about sexual display. (Ian, 1985) Contact Improvisation: The Primary of Touching What is revealed in contact improvisation is mutual understanding, a basic system, a mode of communication. Touch. The fast and subtle skin processing masses, vectors, emotions, giving the muscles the information to correctly move the bones, so the duet can fall through the time and space of demonstration, neither partner hurt, hampered, subjected, objectified. (Paxton, 2003) Contact improvisation began formally in 1972, when a group of Americans experimented with catching each other and falling together. The form developed into a practice of moving while constantly touching, leaning on, lifting, balancing on, or supporting another person. The resulting duet intertwines two bodies in a fluid metamorphosis of falls and suspensions, propelled by the momentum of the dancers' weight. Performed from its inception as an informal demonstration, contact improvisation has also been practiced as a kind of social dance which people simply gets together and does, sometimes in conjunction with other kinds of popular and/or improvisational dancing. Both contemporary American ballet and contact improvisation draw a largely middleclass viewing audience, but ballet, a highly institutionalized performance form, involves many more people as both performers and spectators and holds a privileged position in the mainstream of American art dance. Practitioners of contact improvisation have explicitly conceived of what they do as an alternative dance activity and, in many cases, as a kind of political statement. The sense of touch, which guides the dancing, assumes importance both technically and symbolically for teachers, students, performers, and spectators. Awareness of touching a partner and following "the point of contact" provides the impetus for movement, which adheres to no preset pattern and relies on a general vocabulary of falling and rolling varying from one individual to another. Touch joins the two dancers, attuning them to each other's weight and momentum as they move. Students often begin to learn contact improvisation by lying on the floor and closing their eyes, shutting off the stimulus of sight and thereby focusing more attentively on the skin of the whole body. Deliberately excluding sight, they focus more simply on the kinesthetic. Teachers instruct students to investigate simple movements for long periods of time, suggesting that they sense, feel, experience, notice, and give in to the changing patterns of their own bodies on the floor. These patterns do not concern the shape of the body as perceived by a spectator, but rather have to do with the performer's perception of touch, and, through that touch, the perception of weight and momentum. (Helen, 1993) People learn to partner in contact improvisation by practicing different touching and weight-bearing patterns. While some specific catches or lifts may be taught, longer improvisations based on simple movement ideas -- rising and falling, or dancing with heads constantly touching -- predominate. Almost all classes, including those with beginners in them, include "open dancing," in which people do whatever they can and wish to do within the structure of staying in contact. Teachers often dance with students throughout the class, helping students when they practice technical ideas and sometimes offering more general commentary about their improvisations. Unlike most American dance techniques, however, the teacher acts more as a guide for a certain kind of experience than as the primary purveyor of knowledge in the class, a condition which contributes to the emphasis on internal experience rather than external appearance. No ideal physical type for contact improvisation exists, nor is there a single physical prerequisite for skilled performance. Willingness to coordinate one's efforts with another person and to give up control over one's own movement could be called prerequisites to learning the form, but then every dance form could be said to require a willingness to participate. The absence of physical prerequisites for contact improvisation has encouraged people of different body types and backgrounds to participate and to consider themselves dancers. For the dancer, the body's edges seem to change and to meld with one's partner; likewise, the sense of weight shifts in response to the partner's movement and the movement itself seems generated by and through the points of contact. Emphasis on touch, weight, and momentum supersede attention to visual design of movement, rhythmic control, or choreographic sequencing. In social settings, the connection of one's self and one's partner in contact tends to be the sole focus, while in performing situations awareness of the audience and choreographic considerations may become part of the dancing. Also, skilled contact improvisers, like skilled ballet dancers, have the ability to stretch the form beyond its most simple defining boundaries and may call attention to spatial design, rhythm, or sequencing in their movement, as well as to touch and weight. The viewers of contact improvisation perceive the dancing as less presentationally directed than ballet. Most performances occur in small spaces with the audience in close proximity to the dancers, so that the audience is invited by this setting and by the emphases of the movement to concentrate on the unification of people through physical contact and interaction. Dancers' noises -- breathing, grunting, the sound of falling or catching -- are clearly audible. The spectators' empathetic perception of dancers using weight and momentum encourages them to identify physically and kinesthetically with the dancers. Because performers either dance in silence or tend to use music as general ambiance rather than as rhythmic definition or complement, spectators perceive the rhythm of movement phrases largely through identification with the dancers' impulses. Thus, as the movement structure of ballet stimulates the dancer to visualize herself, and the spectator to admire visual design and musical visualization, so the movement structure of contact improvisation stimulates the dancer to sense herself in mutual motion with a partner, and the spectator to identify with the sensual, proprioceptive experiences of the dancers. The use of the skin as sensory indicator influences not only the dancer's perception of body and self but also the relative importance of aspects of the body as perceived by the audience. The conventions of touch in contact improvisation differ dramatically from those in ballet. First, any parts of the body may be touched without an accompanying signification of "technique" or "expression." Depending on specific performers and specific viewers, different interpretations of touch may be called for, but the conventions of the dance form do not assign particular meanings to particular body parts. Only those contact improvisers who wish to draw out the expressive or dramatic connotations of physical encounter deliberately utilize hand gesture or eye focus. The structure of contact improvisation, thus, reconstitutes the body in a way different from that of everyday social interaction, as well as from many other American dances forms. Second, the contact improvisation duet may be danced by two women or two men, as well as a man and a woman, contributing to an avoidance of gendered attributes in movement. Within the dance, any person may support or be supported by another, regardless of size or sex, so that many kinds of gender configurations and relationships may be implied or interpreted. Use of force varies according to individual dancers and the particular moment in the sequence of movement -- gender does not prescribe styles or roles. The mutual experience of touch thus creates the central impetus for dancing, felt directly by the performers and vicariously by the spectators. Conclusion Contact improvisation offers an almost opposite set of experiences, yet, as an oppositional practice, it engages some of the same cultural concerns as does ballet. In order to shift focus from the visual, beginning dancers close their eyes. When they dance, the body, as in ballet, remains the focus, but rather than being objectified as viewed from the outside, the body ideally becomes the subject of experience from the inside. The practice of contact improvisation seeks to create a sensitivity to touch and to inner sensation (as opposed to the inner expression of ballet), and the sense of self becomes located in the body, as people experience the contact duet as a dialogue with another person through the skin. The viewer learns to identify with the kinesthetic reflexes and dynamic momentum of the dancers by sitting in close proximity to the performance space. Contact improvisation exemplifies physical practices formed as alternatives to dominant cultural emphases on visualism, differentiation of gender, and the use of bodies in the service of art. The parameters of the dancing emphasize an egalitarianism of roles and the ability of each individual to move idiosyncratically yet in concert with others. This ideal of egalitarianism became difficult to maintain historically in the practice of performance, particularly as dance groups applied for government grants and formed themselves into professional companies. Yet this "democratic" orientation continues to characterize much of the practice of contact improvisation and how contact improvisers see themselves. Explicit structures and control have little place in this dance form; hence the perceptual training, which focuses on "feeling free," "letting go," and the experience of self and others, differs greatly from that of ballet. The contact improviser feels herself an individual and a dancer, immersed in and led by physical sensation, responding to another without thought or premeditation, sharing this experience with an audience. The ballet dancer feels herself a special being, a dancer, controlling physical capacity and emotional representation at a choreographer's direction, realizing pre-set choreography and music in presentation to an audience. References Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art. Dance and Literature in EarlyTwentieth-Century British Culture ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) Cahm, Eric "Revolt, Conservatism, and Reaction in Paris, 1905-1925", in M. Bradbury and J. Macfarlane, eds., Modernism ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) Copeland, R. (1990). Founding mothers: Duncan, Graham, Rainer and sexual politics. Dance Theatre Journal, 8(3), 6-9, 27-29. Cunningham describes his approach to dance technique in his article The Function of a Technique for Dance, in Walter Sorell, ed., The Dance Has Many Faces ( New York: World Publishing, 1951), pp. 250-55; and, in conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve, The Dancer and the Dance ( New York: Boyars, 1985). Dempster, Elizabeth (1995) 'Women Writing the Body: Let's Watch a Little How She Dances', pp. 21-38 in Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (eds) Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press Duncan, Irma Duncan Dancer ( Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966); Irma Duncan, The Technique of Isadora Duncan ( Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Horizons, 1970); and Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance ( New York: Theatre Arts, 1928). Foster Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1985. Graham Martha: The American Dance, in Merle Armitage and Virginia Stewart, eds., Modern Dance ( New York: Weyhe, 1935), pp. 101 - 6 ; idem, A Dancer's World, Dance Observer, January 1958, p. 5 ; and in Alice Helpern, The Evolution of Martha Graham's Technique ( Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1981). Helen Thomas, ed., Dance, Gender, and Culture ( London: Macmillan, 1993). Ian Chambers, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture ( London: Macmillan, 1985). Novack, Cynthia Sharing the Dance: An Ethnography of Contact Improvisation ( Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Untitled statement, Contact Quarterly 12, no. 2 ( 1987), p. 44. Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Untitled statement, Contact Quarterly 12, no. 2 ( 1987), p. 44. Paul Spencer, ed., Society, and the Dance: The Social Anthropology of Process and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Paxton, Steve. "Drafting Interior Techniques." Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Eds., Albright, Ann Cooper, and David Gere. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003: 175-184. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Susan Foster, "The Signifying Body: Reaction and Resistance in Post-modern Dance," Theatre Journal 37, no. 1 ( March 1985), pp. 45-64. Urmson, J.O. (1976), 'The performing arts', in H.D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy (4th Series) (London: George Allen & Un win), pp. 239-52. Wolff, J, Reinstating corporeality : feminism and body politics in Meaning in motion by Desmond, J.C., Duke UP, 1997, pages 81-120 . Wollen, Peter "Fashion/Orientalism/The Body", in New Formations 1 ( Spring 1987). Read More