Liberty dances: Women's movements and the revival of faith in American capitalist-democracy (Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Madonna)

Working at the intersection of two fields of humanistic inquiry (Dance History and Feminist Theory), this dissertation seeks to unfold, explain and complicate the relationship between American Modern Dance and Western Feminism. By reading danced performances of national liberation alongside texts of sexual liberation, I reinterpret the political reach of the cult of domesticity, the historical domain of western bourgeois women's power and oppression. I find that in moments of national crisis “women's movements” (in both print and kinesathetic media) have rescued American capitalism by reviving Americans' faith in participatory democracy. From abolitionism to postmodernism, women's movements have created a “civic religion” of showing care and respect for others that facilitates the incorporation of Others into a cultural celebration of upward mobility for all.; While drawing on recent and long-standing explanations of the significance of the body to civil society, my inquiry also intervenes in Feminism and DanceStudies, especially as these disciplines address the question—the fact—of the influence of women's culture on the discourse and machinations of social justice (righting the wrongs of the past). Drawing on the scholarly representation of modern dance as a site of cultural resonance (rather than avant-gardism), I have sought to reconnect modern dance to popular (and populist) rituals of millenialism, but without holding myself aloof from its empathetic powers; without, in effect, demystifying it for those who would not be ‘taken in.’ I am taken in by the kineasthetics of effortful patterns that redefine the symbolics of self/other and thus move the cultural boundaries of America.; This dissertation reads women's movements as celebrations of human progress, most poignantly, in the dances of three American Liberty Goddesses—Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Madonna. Each of these dancers, I argue, has helped to ‘liberate’ America from entrenched hierarchies of race, gender and class—and to save capitalism from itself—by performing a body that sheds its shame, throws off the heavy chains of indifference and sham superiority, and evinces for all, a secular, multicultural faith in ‘Man.’...