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American Dance Pioneer Martha Graham and the Ghosts of Feminism

This article explores the mutual haunting between American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and feminism. This haunting comes out of the confusion between what can be considered the predominantly feminist character of Graham’s life and work coupled with Graham’s outright rejection of a feminist consciousness.

Research Rationale

This article was part of an on-going project on Graham and the ever-increasing complex but theoretical discussion of Graham’s possible feminist identifications and their effects. This article is a shorter version of one featured in the monograph. It is placed specifically with a women’s studies/feminist theory journal in order to circulate Graham’s importance as a significant figure in the cultural history of the twentieth century, including her influential relationships with other significant female figures (such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Ford). This was a strategy particularly designed to counter-act the ghettoization of dance research, which is often restricted to Dance History journals and thus interpreted as not culturally and politically significant.

Strategies Undertaken

The essay first argues for the performative force of “doing” (Butler 1988, 1997) a feminist identity as a foil for Graham’s public written reputation of feminism. It charts both the changing cultural and social beliefs of and about women in the 20th century alongside Graham’s specific geographical, social, cultural and historical placement in that history and its possible impact on her processes of identification. The essay then makes a close contextual reading of one of Graham’s works of the early 1930s, Primitive Mysteries (1931), to illustrate its radical conception of the female body both at the time of its premiere and over subsequent reconstructions. Thoms finishes arguing that the question of Graham’s feminism is an important one because it remains unanswered.