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Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies is a scholarly study of the dance-in--a dancer who executes a star's choreography as cameras are being focused and lights are being set. Focusing on dance-ins in mid-twentieth century Hollywood, when film musicals and the studio system were at their height, author Anthea Kraut exposes the racialized and gendered corporeal ecosystem that operated behind the scenes, propping up and concealed behind the seeming self-referentiality of white stars' filmic dancing bodies.
List of contents
- Introduction: Bodies, Reproductive Labor, and Research at the Margins
- Chapter 1: 'Doing Angie': Betty Grable, Surrogation, and the (Non)Indexicality of Whiteness
- Chapter 2: Marie Bryant, Black Reproductive Labor, and White Parasitism
- Chapter 3: Female Reproductive Labor and White Corporeal Debt in Singin' in the Rain
- Chapter 4: "Cool It, Alex": Queering the Dance-in
- Chapter 5: Racial Dis/Orientations and the Ambivalence of Nancy Kwan's Dancing Body
- Coda
- Index
- Bibliography
About the author
Anthea Kraut is Professor in the Department of Dance at UC Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies. Her research focuses on the racial and gender politics of U.S. dance. She is the author of
Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston and
Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, as well as the past recipient of an ACLS fellowship, an NEH fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
