Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

This transdisciplinary historiographical account elucidates the ways in which dancing bodies have provided evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanity, and Islam throughout the twentieth century. Linking the sociopolitical discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, this study interrogates the formation of dominant categories of “modern,” “high,” and “artistic,” and the subsequent “othering” of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the “national” stage. Through utilizing and probing a wide variety of textual and visual sources, this inquiry offers a history of corporeality centered on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and its spectatorial cultural ideology.