ce of maintaining a dainty feminine figure. For this reason ballet uniforms become an important aspect of a young ballerina’s training. Young ballerinas are given specific guidelines for how to do their hair and what to wear to ballet class. The leotards and tights dancers are required to wear encourages conformity among the class, as well as while making it easy to spot the dancer’s physical imperfections. Such measures train a young dancer to value a slim figure and feminine proportions, and consequently the importance of such traits eventually becomes a part of their thought process.
As a female ballet dancer’s training progresses, the concepts of femininity and a slim figure require constant discipline, however the efforts made to achieve these goals begins to feel natural. Yet however natural these behaviors feel, author Sandra Lee Bartkey in her article “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”, argues that such actions merely represent the “artifice” of femininity. Bartkey explains that this desire for femininity is largely self-imposed and while it may feel to women that their decisions are under their control, their efforts are guided by discipline which precedes a woman’s ability to actually choose. More specifically Bartkey maintains that there are three main disciplinary practices through which woman’s behavior is guided towards the feminine: size and configuration, posture and movement, and using the body as a surface for adornment (Bartkey 95). These three disciplinary practices prompt women to strive for a slim figure, move in a manner that is graceful and modest, while also subtly conveying eroticism, and to look young and beautiful. As a performance art, size and configuration, posture and movement, and the body as a surface for adornment become especially important to ballerinas for such disciplines are central to the success of their careers.
Many young, slim, beautiful, and feminine professional ballerina’s have been produced from these disciplinary practices, which has lead to a blurring of the line between ballet dancer and model. The frequent crossover between fashion designers and ballet companies, suggests that ballet dancers are not only expected to uphold their role as a ballet dancer, but also that of a model.
Furthermore the whole idea of a ballerina lifestyle has proven to be appealing to consumers, which has made it necessary for female ballet dancers to carry forth their discipline for ballet in all aspects of their lives. Elizabeth Wissinger explains in her article “Modeling Consumption: Fashion Modeling Work in Contemporary Society” the necessity of models (and by extension ballerinas) to live the type of lifestyle that consumers want to partake in through consumption: “By working hard to produce the image of living the ‘model life’, workers in this industry model a lifestyle that is then packaged and sold to consumers as an experience that can be had for the price of their attention” (Wissinger 273). As ballerina’s are becoming increasingly involved with advertising, the ballet dancers are expected to maintain not only the model life that Wissinger explains but also the perfect ballerina life that consumers now want to buy into.
The crux of the issue remains that in order for a ballerina to find success she must meet the most extreme expectations of feminine beauty, which inevitably leads to the perpetuation of a value system that idealizes an unattainable feminine form. While certain physical qualifications are needed to meet these goals, it is the costuming and ballet uniforms which most outwardly project the feminine expectations of a ballerina. Moreover the recent increase in collaborations between designers and ballet dancers demonstrates the inherent connection between success and upholding feminine expectations in industries attempting to sell a dream or a particular lifestyle to consumers.
Bartkey, Sandra Lee. Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. Trans. Alan Sherid