gendup – Zentrum für Gender Studies und Frauenförderung der BdR-Universität Salzburg – Gender Gastprofessorin
Zeit: Mittwoch, 15. Mai 2013, 18.00 Uhr
Ort: Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Rudolfskai 42, HS 380
Recreational dancing was one of the most common leisure activities for young people in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century with ballroom dancing being the predominant dance-hall repertory. Based on documentary evidence and on ethno-historical interviews with women this lecture addresses the performance of gendered identities through ballroom dancing in 1950s Ireland.
The dance hall space, it is proposed, was constructed as a ‚romantic utopia‘ – a space that was special, glamorous and modern and in which women could play out the ’staged dramas of everyday life‘ (Illouz, 1997). It is argued that these dance performances both reflected and fostered shifting forms of identities for women; a move towards individualism, a hyper- femininity in the ‚presentation of self‘, as well as an increasing identification with urban modernity and consumption. There were contradictions in the ‚romantic utopia‘ too. And, while the dance hall was an escape from everyday reality, a place of fantasy and pleasure, it was also a space of displeasure and gender work because of the imbalance of gender power both in the dance-hall space and in the society at large.
Barbara O‘ Connor lectured in the School of Communications, Dublin City University from 1987-2011 on the sociological and anthropological aspects of media, communication and culture. She has also taught at a number of universities abroad including; La Trobe University, Melbourne Australia, University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida, USA, and the Communication Department at Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria.
Source: femaLE-L@jku.at