Susan Funkenstein on Dance, Gender, and Imagery of the Weimar Republic
Stamps Lecturer Susan Funkenstein’s new book Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic (University of Michigan Press, 2020) explores complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in history, Germany’s first democracy (1918−1933), depicted in visual art and imagery of this era.
Conversing across German studies, art history, dance studies, gender studies, and popular culture studies, Marking Modern Movement is a clearly written, extensively illustrated book accessible to general readers and undergraduates. The book is published as part of the Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany Series, a showcase for the best work in German Studies across the disciplines, drawing cutting-edge scholarship from the fields of history, cultural and literary studies, visual culture, and film.
University of Michigan Press offers the Stamps School community 30% off of the online purchase of this book with the promocode UMFUNKENSTEIN.
Rather than mere titillation, the images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together. In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists’ deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected. Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment.”