Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in
Modern Erotic Dance situates the 1908 dance craze, which The New York Times
called "Salomania," as a crucial event and a turning point in the history of
the modern business of erotic dance. Framing Salomania with reference to
imperial ideologies of motherhood and race, it works toward better
understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body
in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This study turns critical attention to cultures of maternity
in the late 19th century, primarily with reference to the ways in which women
are defined in relation to their genitals as patriarchal property and space and
are valued according to reproduction as their primary labour. Erotic dance as
it takes shape in the modern representation of Salome insists both that the
mother is and is not visible in the body of the dancer, a contradiction this
study characterizes as reproductive fetishism.
Looking at a range of media, the study traces the modern
figure of Salome through visual art, writing, early psychoanalysis and dance,
from "hootchie kootch" to the performances dancer Maud Allan called "mimeo-dramatic"
to mid-20th-century North American films such as Billy Wilder's
Sunset
Boulevard and Charles Lamont's
Salome, Where She Danced to the
21st-century HBO series
The Sopranos.