The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe.

Susan Leigh Foster's "The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe" is a performative lecture exploring the sexual and gender constructs within balletic dance. Countering Romantic era ideas of the ballerina as the hyperfeminine subject, Foster reorients conventional understandings toward the ballerina as the vehicle for performing masculine desire. The ballerina is the central focus throughout the performance-an erect, dancing body donning flesh-toned hues that is always guided, lifted, and positioned by the male dancer who is secondary in focus but who is effectively in control. She is, Foster argues, a phallus. As the physical and symbolic representation of male desire and power, the ballerina originates from masculine notions of femininity, most often appearing in classic ballet as either the ethereal and virginal dancer or the exotic, mysterious "other" who, in either instance, the plot often disappears or kills after she fulfills her function. Foster links the sexualized ballerina to several tenets upholding patriarchy, among them the balletic body as an object of sexualized fantasy and as a "fetishized promise of sexual acquisition."

Underscoring Foster's argument are her own balletic movements: she balances on one leg, extending the other on the table and performing various gestures before unzipping her pants to unfurl the limp, pink ballet tights at the moment she announces the ballerina as phallus. She situates small ballerina figurines on the table, removing them from a 1950s-era pink ballet bag, continuing to balance on one leg, before eventually rolling up her pants leg to shave the other leg with a razor and shaving cream. Every object is pink. Foster's movements are linked theoretically and temporally to her concluding argument that, although ballet has seen great transformation since the Romantic era, contemporary balletic dance nonetheless employs a phallic ballerina who enacts masculine desire through her legs and, by extension, her pointe shoes. While not absent from the male gaze, Foster points to the increasing number of solo dances and female-led choreographies, among other feminist advances within ballet, as opportunities for subsuming the phallus into the woman, creating a "monstrous" subject defying categorization or limitation. The lecture is followed by a Question and Answer discussion.

Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire, Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull, and Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. She is also the editor of three anthologies: Choreographing History, Corporealities, and Worlding Dance. Three of her danced lectures can be found at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage website.