Masculinity in the nineteenth-century Paris opéra ballet

Beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, ballerinas overtook male dancers on the stage of the Paris Opéra Ballet and in critical writings about the ballet. At the same time, there was tremendous growth in bourgeois male subscribership to the Opéra. Subscribers engaged in backstage affairs with ballerinas, replicating an aristocratic tradition and exchanging financial protection for sex. In this thesis I ask why male dancers grew so unpopular at this time and what their unpopularity reveals about French masculinity. I argue that newly enfranchised bourgeois audience members used the Opéra as a site to negotiate their masculinity in conjunction with the aristocracy that had preceded them. They rejected danseurs because they were tangible symbols of the pre-Revolutionary period, but embraced financial protection arrangements with ballerinas to mark their ascension as the most powerful class in France, thus creating a complex and nuanced bourgeois masculinity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Campus Only Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History and Philosophy

Year dc:date.available

2013

Author dc:creator

• Christmas, Andrea

Contributors dc:contributor

• Jesse Kauffman, Ph.D., Chair
• John McCurdy, Ph.D.
• Ronald Delph, Ph.D.

• Sex
• masculinity
• France Nineteenth-Century
• Opera de Paris
• Ballet
• European History

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.emich.edu/theses/487

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.emich.edu:theses-1858