Dance Classes-Dancing between Classifications

Abstract

Women's involvement within both performance and social dance has long been trivialized by cultural analysts and social historians alike. Dance has tended then, to be dismissed as `meaningless'. However, as Angela McRobbie's work has shown, dance can take on particular significance within the context of working-class femininity. This trivialization, or regulated ignoring of social dance, can then be located as part of the wider tendency which Carolyn Steedman describes as `the tradition of cultural criticism in this country which has celebrated a kind of psychological simplicity' within working-class life (1986: 12). The treatment of the life-narrative drawn upon in this article seeks to illustrate the complex meanings an involvement in dance can have within the context of a working-class girlhood and womanhood, and thus aims at highlighting how involvement within a popular cultural practice such as dance relates to the constitution of subjectivity.