Fwd: CFP-Women and Performance.

[Allana Lindgren]

CFP-Women and Performance.

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Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Call For Papers
Sounding It Out: The Music and Dance Divide

If there's live music in a contemporary dance performance, it likely 
involves men standing to the side of the stage, playing music on their 
guitars or computers, while women dance.  It's a seemingly inevitable
occurrence, fraught with long-standing cultural assumptions.  As Susan 
Foster explains when discussing the gendered differences between 
mid-century music and dance:  "Music's visible abundance of 
'structure,' its close alliance with mathematics, and the viability of 
its notation system carried a masculine valence that contrasted with 
dance's feminine ephemerality and bodiliness. [
] Enjoying the full 
range of stereotypic attributes associated with the feminine, dance was 
often viewed as ornamental or sensual, chaotic or emotional, fecund but 
insubstantial."   Although these notions were prevalent in the late 
1950s, they preceded and continue to exist well beyond the New York 
avant-garde.  Any tour through Western performance history or critical 
theory (or even a look at who attends which academic conferences), 
reveals that dance and music are analyzed consistently as distinct 
entities: one historically female, the other historically male; one of 
the body, the other of the mind; one seen, the other heard.

The consequences of these binaries are far-reaching.  Inextricable from 
power relations, entrenched institutional biases, and historical 
circumstance, gendered divisions between music and dance affect how we 
understand and respond to bodies. They also shape people's freedom to 
move.  Therefore, this issue of Women & Performance:  a journal of 
feminist theory seeks articles that disrupt these binary divisions. 
Possible topics include collaborations between musicians and dancers; 
gendered disruptions of appropriate sound; the meaning of "dance 
music"; choreographic order; systems of notation; musicians who compose 
with gesture, or who undeniably dance while playing; dancers who make 
noise; female DJs, classical composers, or break dancers; the relation 
between instrument and voice; and non-Western or diasporic traditions 
where these divisions operate differently or don't apply.

Although articles should be grounded in the analysis of performance, 
writers are encouraged to consider the work's broader implications.  
For example, how might these performances shift popular understandings 
of genre, or disrupt historical narratives?  Do they complicate 
existing theories of embodiment?  Do they challenge assumptions about 
"rigorous" or "serious" art?   How does the gendered division between 
music and dance relate to other aspects of identity?  Because the 
importance of these questions extends well beyond the field of dance 
studies, Women & Performance seeks submissions from a range of academic 
disciplines.

Submission Guidelines
Please submit manuscripts electronically as e-mail attachments in 
Microsoft Word. All emails should be addressed to Danielle Goldman, 
Guest Editor, at danielle.goldman at nyu.edu. Essays should be
double-spaced, with 1-inch margins; articles should not exceed 10,000 
words. Please follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition.  All 
manuscripts should be submitted with a 500 word abstract.  Submissions 
due no later than September 15, 2006.



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Dr. Allana Lindgren
SSHRC Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Faculty of Fine Arts
University of Victoria