Édouard Lock's dance film Amelia (2002) is the focus of this essay. Second-wave feminist and poststructuralist perspectives inform the analysis of this piece of contemporary dance. Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory and Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic and symbolic realms of representation are explored and critiqued, whilst Jacques Derrida's deconstruction forms the basis of the poststructuralist inquiry. The work of dance scholars including Ann Daly, Susan Leigh Foster and Ann Cooper Albright is drawn upon in relation to applying these theories to dance. This analysis demonstrates how dance, and specifically Lock's work, questions the limits of feminist and poststructuralist theories. The dissection of binary oppositions is a feminist and poststructuralist concern and as such, this common strategy is investigated through Amelia. Application of feminist and poststructuralist theories demonstrate that Lock's choreography presents ambiguous gender identities and challenges the boundaries of balletic convention whilst also acknowledging the necessity of conventional frameworks of identity. This analysis serves to highlight Lock's choreography as a valuable tool for comparing feminist and poststructuralist theories and leads to useful lines of questioning in each. The film version of Édouard Lock's Amelia (2002), performed by La La La HumanSteps, 2 will be analysed here from poststructuralist and feminist perspectives. These perspectives will be critically juxtaposed with the aim of revealing both complementary and contrasting lines of enquiry, striving to highlight some associated challenges specifically in relation to dance. This investigation probes how Lock's choreography questions the limits of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction and explores second-wave feminist theories which question the possibility, or indeed the desirability, of complete gender equality. Lock's confrontation of binary oppositions informs the feminist perspective taken here, which moves towards a postfeminist position, both embracing and inverting dualism and posing a challenge to the respective acceptance and transcendence of dualism in liberal and radical feminisms. In particular, the discussion extends to: the questioning of convention and the necessity to work within, or in parallel to, conventional structures, even when striving to displace them; the contradiction of applying a static theory of female objectification to a mobile art form such as dance; the challenge of identifying a *
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