Conclusions: ‘Losing It’: Dance Cultures and New Modes of Femininity

Abstract

That the significance of being a woman is currently undergoing some important changes is indisputable. Although nobody is suggesting that changes to femininity are happening uniformly, or denying that the speed and form of their development are bound to reflect social divisions based upon race, education and social class for example, it is nevertheless clear that as we enter a new millennium, we do so leaving behind us many of the values, attitudes and assumptions which have long underpinned dominant ideas about femininity’s ‘rightful’ place and its ‘appropriate’ life-course. Familiar constructions of femininity are being quite rapidly eroded as increasingly, women invest more and more time, energy and desire outside the domestic and familial realms, outside the heterosexual partnership, and in short, outside those ‘happy-ever-after’ narratives of romantic closure.