Fantasies of Adventure, Escape and Return: Tracey Emin’s Why I Never Became a Dancer

In this chapter I analyse Tracey Emin’s short film Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) and argue for its importance to a feminist art history that takes time as its principal concept. My intention is to explore how Emin’s feminism is articulated through the manipulation of time and to consider how her work has been critically positioned in relation to feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s. By starting this book with an analysis of a film by Emin I wish to signal that my approach is not chronological. It does not follow a developmental path of precedents and influences that lead up to Emin’s work, but takes her provocative expressions of desire, trauma and memory as a starting point for feminist art history. It is to start where students of visual culture often begin their journey into sexual politics, with a visual practice that speaks to them about something that matters.