This chapter focuses on Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance to exemplify the interplay between performer and character as a central aspect of queer modernist performance that was foregrounded through the uncanny qualities of Fuller’s work. Charting Fire Dance from its origins in Fuller’s 1895 version of Salome through to its reworking as a solo and its reappearance in her autobiography, the chapter traces a queer genealogy of uncanny doubles that included Oscar Wilde, Salome, heretical witches, and new women in an incremental layering of queer and feminist resonances that flickered into view through Fuller’s experiment in illuminated dance. The uncanny in Fuller’s work thus emanated from an integral and coproductive relationship between modernist aesthetics and sexual queerness that intersected through her performing body in an intensification of the interplay between character and role, onstage and offstage, and representation and presence that was a crucial facet of queer modernist performance.
Review of Irish Women and Nationalism : Soldiers, New Women and Wicked Hags, edited by Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward