Queering the Skeleton in Dance's Closet

This article explores the role a human skeleton played in queering and shaping of dance modernism. In early decades twentieth century, an important intervention propelling toward modernist aesthetic while disrupting regulatory norms gender construction, began women's college gymnasium via skeleton. Two impulses generate this archival-based inquiry: one that traces history symbolic formulations nationalism, race, followed skeletons into university as they anchored conceptualizations dancing body; another locates queer body through