Introduction

Describing gender relations has become more complex since a man could confidently assert that women’s hair grows longer because it waves and screens the delicate shoulders from injuries ‘which might be sustained by free exposure to air’ (Rowland 10). Yet the study of masculinity in the late twentieth century had a hard time when it came to finding critical acceptance. Initially it was frequently understood as an antifeminist backlash, a typical joke being ‘Why study masculinity now? We haven’t been doing anything else for centuries!’ For some, the concept of masculinity itself was an irrelevant joke: in 1994, Private Eye condemned one of the editors to ‘Pseuds’ Corner’ for daring to instigate a conference on the topic, presumably because of the advertised desire to explore homoerotic triangles in Renaissance literature and yoghurt. Yet the common observation that what is pervasive in society and culture often remains invisible also holds true for masculinity. As John McLeod has argued, until recently, the cultural critic was faced with blankness ‘when interrogating the abstractions of masculinity’ (218). In this volume, Gerald Siegmund explores this paradox of masculinity being both everywhere and nowhere in relation to Romantic ballet: he focuses on the gradual uncovering of the semiotics of the male dancer on stage, and the contradiction between the requirement for male dancers in classical ballet and their relegation to the background.