Between moving bodies: Power, the senses and crafting the gifted body

Abstract

This thesis examines the creation of gifted bodies, their sensory experiences and operations of institutional power. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a professional classical ballet school in Toronto, Canada, I examine how the students relate to the training processes they must undergo in order to become gifted, where powerful exchange relations between student, teacher and school facilitate the creation of body, identity and institution. I begin by suggesting that the institutional training of gifted bodies may be easily pursued through Marcel Mauss' (1954) theory of gift exchange, where gifts of skill, technique and training are exchanged between teachers and students during daily interactions within the ballet school. Over the years of training, these regularised gift exchanges result in the gifted body - the core valuable of the institution. However, these are corporeal gifts belonging to and residing within bodies, of ways of moving and feeling, which cycle between bodies - something Mauss' thesis does not permit access to. In recognising this, throughout this thesis I follow and extend Rosalyn Diprose's (2002) insight into the possibilities of corporeal generosity and an openness between bodies to bring Mauss' thesis into the realm of the corporeal and sensory. Addressing existing literatures of giftedness and ballet, I discuss how gifted bodies and their relations have traditionally been analysed visually, where the performing body has been read for what it may reveal about giftedness, gender, culture and society. As I will show, this has often obscured the emic experiences of those engaged in such processes as well as the relations of power that operate to shape and array bodies within the institution. While the results of these powerful relations are sometimes made visible on the body - where muscles become strengthened, stretched and sculpted - I argue that the creation of the gifted body is not pursued by the institution or experienced by the individuals in this way. Instead, this is a process felt by bodies at the level of sensibility. To access these felt experiences, both haptic and affective, I apply a sensory analysis privileging touch, which I argue is the way in which gifts for ballet are transmitted, received and experienced by the body and through which giftedness is accrued. To do so, I expand a definition of touch beyond physical contact to also encompass feeling between and within bodies from which movement cannot be undone. Utilising touch in such a way allows an examination of the intercorporeal relations between teacher and student in the ballet studio and the way such relations involve the exchange of multisensory gifts. This approach provides a different avenue through which to understand the powerful operations at work on and between bodies in the context of the institution, where it becomes apparent that the gifting relations that work to shape bodies and the hierarchies these encounters perpetuate, enable the creation of bodies, identities and the institution itself. Yet these are operations that determine which bodies become gifted and which do not. As such, the pain experiences of students provide an apt illustration of the interface between bodies and institutions, indicating not only success or failure or the body's physical transformation but also the regularised injustices which make the gifted body, identities and the institution possible. To conclude I expand this discussion beyond the realm of classical ballet to suggest that a similar approach may be applied to other forms of institutional life where other kinds of gifted bodies are also the core valuable. Show more