The Dancing Girl in Recent Cinema

From the serpentine dancers of early cinema, to the show-girls of classical Hollywood, the ballerinas of the modern horror film and the girl stars of TikTok, the young, female dancing body is as ubiquitous on screen as she is in academic film studies. This book interweaves political philosophy and film theory with dance and music scholarship in order to demonstrate and explain the political meanings constructed by the dancing girls in contemporary screen media. Through an in-depth exploration of case studies that centralise the dancing bodies of marginalised and vulnerable girls, this book interrogates the relationship between dance, music, film and girlhood in the contemporary neoliberal landscape. The first book-length study of the figure of the dancing girl on screen, this book offers readers a framework through which the politics of these girls’ dancing bodies can be understood.