Light in the heels : the emergence of the effeminate male dancer in eighteenth-century English history

Access restricted to the OSU CommunityThis project investigates the history of the connections between dance and male effeminacy by examining portrayals of male dancers in three bodies of source materials from the English Restoration and eighteenth century: dramatic comedy, Addison and Steele's periodical the Spectator, and the visual and written works of William Hogarth. These sources shed light on the early history of effeminacy and demonstrate the importance of dance to the construction of the effeminate man as a recognizable type in English culture. The three types of source materials examined in this project, from three succeeding periods, each present a slightly different though related perspective on dance and the male dancer in English culture. The Restoration comedies examined here pay particular attention to the growing influence of French aristocratic culture on London's upper class, and the playwrights use the effeminate male dancer as a focal point for their ridiculing critique. The Spectator focuses much of its attention on the proper bourgeois Englishman, with the failings and excesses of the dancing man helping to delineate the boundaries of this newly important subject position. In Hogarth's work, dance and the male dancer often function as symbols of mistaken aesthetic judgment, a bad taste that he portrays as widespread in London society at this time. Hogarth deploys effeminacy, and significantly sodomy, as part of his critique of these aesthetic trends in the service of his attempts at reform. In each of the source materials examined for this project, the dancing man plays a noticeable and relatively consistent role. Rarely, if ever, a noble or dignified character, the male dancer instead serves again and again as the butt of satire, demonstrating, in significant part through his dancing, his failings as a man. Each of the sources relies on a connection between effeminacy and the male dancer to further its various rhetorical agendas. These examples thus clearly establish the existence of an association between men who dance and effeminacy in a period much earlier than has typically been acknowledged in twentieth-century writings on dance