This essay traces the development of Bishop’s negotiations of gender from the 1930s to the 1970s. We show how Bishop explores an emerging and increasingly embodied subjectivity as her work develops. In particular, we show the way her use of male and female pronouns can be used to trace an increasing interest in gender as a set of inter-relational differences. Beginning with two early poems, we examine the complex ways in which gender identifications are interrogated in relation to ideas of looking and reflection, and are offered as a negotiation of the male literary tradition: specifically here in relation to Tennyson, and to Defoe. We also explore the way constructions of the feminine become more frequent in the writing and are connected to race.

Although no real institutionalization of intersectional studies as such has yet taken place, the habit of thinking in terms of intersectional identities has established itself fully across multiple fields—from critical race theory to gender studies and queer studies as well as in sociological and legal studies. Steinman looks at some of the ways that intersectional studies have informed literary critical practice, including studies that focus on Wallace Stevens’s own identity (in terms of gender, race, and class) and on the figures enabled and occluded by his poetic imagination. Describing how previous critical work that addressed race, class, or gender in Stevens’s poetry might be refigured in light of the perspectives intersectional studies have brought to critical attention, Steinman offers, as an example of the merits and drawbacks of reading Stevens intersectionally, a discussion of “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern.” She sets this against an account of how many contemporary writers of color respond more to Stevens’s style than to his representations of others, voicing an ambivalence that repositions their work and Stevens’s work within African American literary tradition; Steinman suggests that such voices might open new possibilities for intersectional studies of Stevens.

With reference to an impressive range of examples from across European genres and repertoires, Suzanne Aspden illustrates ways in which dance has been embodied within Western ‘art’ music. Exploding the myth of ‘the music itself’, Aspden notes a significant historical swing in both aesthetics and compositional practice during the nineteenth century, as musical representations of dance gradually morphed from being overtly ornamental and elaborate to more straightforwardly transparent in their dependence upon a long-established vocabulary of musical topics. While tracing this historical shift, Aspden offers a nuanced critical commentary on some of the shop-worn assumptions about dance that have marked traditional textbook histories of European music, especially negative associations between dance and the anti-intellectual, the ‘low’, the feminine and the ‘Other’.