Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 15, No.

31, 2000

Consuming the Ballerina: Feet, Fetishism and the Pointe Shoe

KERYN CARTER

In his book Dance in its Time Walter Sorell begins a chapter entitled ‘Balletomania’ with
the following anecdote. It concerns the shoes of the famous nineteenth-century ballerina
Marie Taglioni:
A Russian balletomane bought a pair of Taglioni’s ballet slippers for 200 rubles
to take to a farewell dinner celebrating the dancer’s departure for France in
March 1842. This gala dinner featured as the main dish Taglioni’s slippers,
which, expertly cooked, were served with a special sauce.1
Fetishistic interest in the ballerina’s shoe is not isolated to this early, dramatic example—
it survives today in various forms. The shoes of the woman dancer continue to fascinate
ballet fans perhaps because they are the point(e) of the dancer’s contact with the earth.
No matter how ethereal, how  eshless she may appear, it is the foot in its delicate looking
sheath-like shoe which grounds her to the earth, which must always contact; which marks
her as  eshy, earthbound, human. It Ž lls up with her sweat and blood. It is the point at
which the theatrical illusion meets physical reality.
This article teases out some of the more intriguing contemporary representations of
women dancers’ shoes and women dancers’ feet, and argues that an analysis of these
images in terms of fetishism opens up the issue of women and masquerade in relation to
dance.2 I turn speciŽ cally to psychoanalytic theories of fetishism and perversity because
I believe that representations of the ballerina’s shoes and feet are in fact highly eroticised.
Psychoanalysis, with its broadened deŽ nition of sexuality, therefore offers the opportunity
for an extensive exploration of this topic. As a feminist critic interested in the popular
and paradoxical Ž gure of the contemporary ballerina, I will be concerned here with the
ways in which the shoes of the woman dancer are ‘marketed’ and ‘read’.
The anecdote concerning the consumption of Taglioni’s shoes provides a rich point of
access. This little story resonates with the two related senses in which the term ‘fetish’ is
commonly used: both the anthropological sense of an object revered and worshipped for
its mystical power, and also the speciŽ cally sexual sense. It is clear that the cooking and
eating of the  esh-coloured shoe is a quasi-religious act: as intimate apparel, Taglioni’s
ballet slippers are extensions of her body; they are also objects invested with the ‘magic’
of her art.3 The fetishisation of objects closely related to the skin, ‘particularly the
odiferous skin’, is a reasonably common occurrence;4 however it is the excessive nature
of Sorell’s little ritual which strikes one as unusual. The group of balletomanes who
worshipped at Taglioni’s shrine in a sense absorbed Taglioni herself—drew her power into
their own bodies through an ancient formulation which equates the ritualistic consump-

ISSN 0816-4649 print; 1465-3303 online/00/310081-10 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
82 K. Carter

tion of the  esh and blood of the Other with the appropriation of his or her wisdom,
magic, and power.5
When considering Sorell’s tale, however, one also needs to consider the question of
orality and its relation to fetishism in the explicitly sexual sense of the term: what does
it mean to absorb, to consume the shoes of a revered woman? This eating of the
ballerina’s shoe is a perverse act: the ballet shoes—which in one sense metaphorically
represent the woman’s dancing body but which also carry some residue of that body with
them—function as phallic objects when consumed by the balletomane. This consumption
of the ballerina, however, may also be viewed as a defensive action on the part of the
subject who eats rather than allows him or herself to be eaten, since this consumption
contains more than an echo of the so-called oral stage which has been elucidated by
Melanie Klein.
During this early stage of his or her development, the child believes that all life  ows
from the mother’s breast.6 Fearful for its life in the shadow of the mother’s power, and
enraged that her life-giving presence is not always and constantly available, the child
develops an aggressive attitude towards not only its mother’s breast but her whole
body—an aggressive impulse which is expressed through sadistic fantasies of devouring
and possessing that body. At this point, writes Klein, ‘the subject’s dominant aim is to
possess himself of the contents of the mother’s body and to destroy her by means of every
weapon which sadism can command’.7 The act of taking Taglioni’s revered shoes into
the body may thus be read as a ritualised regression to the struggle for subjecthood, in
which the child fantasises the consumption of the mother in order to ward off its own
consumption. This is the cannibalisation of the pre-Oedipal mother, but it is also the
acquisition of some portion of her immense power. This ritualistic act is highly charged,
then, with fetishistic ‘magic’. The inanimate objects cover over, conceal, but also reveal
the enormity of the mother’s power, and in the process engender a sexualised satisfaction
in the body of the consuming subject.
But to return more speciŽ cally to the question of fetishism: Freud writes in his ‘Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ that the foot is ‘an age-old sexual symbol which
occurs even in mythology’.8 Presumably he means to imply that the foot is a symbol of
male sexuality, since he explains in the accompanying note that, ‘The shoe or slipper is
a corresponding symbol of the female genitals’.9 This chain of symbolisation has interesting
repercussions for the way in which women dancers and their shoes are ‘consumed’ as
marketable products, and also sheds a revealing light upon some aspects of women
dancers’ actual experience. Here it is important to remember that men, of course, do not
wear pointe shoes: ‘pointe work’ is exclusively a female art. Although there have been
occasional exceptions to this rule, when men don pointe shoes it is to achieve a highly
speciŽ c effect—usually a comic one.10 The piercing grip of the pointe shoe is not, under
normal circumstances, available to the male dancer.
The feet of women classical dancers are, thanks to pointe work, far from ethereal: not
only are they necessarily extremely strong, but they are commonly plagued by bunions,
ingrown toenails, calluses and blisters. At any level of expertise, pointe work causes a
good deal of pain. A 1990 article on pointe shoes written by a woman dancer, Christine
Aitken, and directed primarily at a dance readership, is entitled ‘These Instruments of
Torture’, and begins with a series of light-hearted but revealing comparisons between the
pointe shoe and the iron maiden, the rack, and the thumb screw.11 From at least one
perspective it would surely not be an understatement to suggest that the balletic art
maintains its illusion of extreme, perfectly performed ‘femininity’ at the extraction of a
‘torturous’ price, and that its ‘instruments of torture’ are—at least by Freud’s logic—
 Consuming the Ballerina 83

symbols for female genitalia. However I wish to argue that the cultural signiŽ cation of
the pointe shoe is in fact multiple: that the woman’s pointe shoe has become, like its
cousin the stiletto, a complex cultural fetish which stands in for both male and female
genitalia, rather than a straightforward ‘symbol’.
Writing in 1927 of a speciŽ c case of fetishism, Freud noted that the fetishistic article,
‘covered up the genitals entirely and concealed the distinction between them. Analysis
showed that it signiŽ ed that women were castrated and that they were not castrated’.12
It is the ambiguity of the fetish which is most fascinating here: that for Freud a
fundamental quality of any given fetish is that it be able to stand in the fetishist’s
imagination for both the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’, the visible and the ‘invisible’,
disavowing the difference between these states. And, as I hope to suggest, the pointe shoe
Ž ts these demands perfectly.
For Freud, however, the adult fetish stands in not only for anxiety over genital
difference, but for the infantile fantasy of the maternal phallus:

In every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in
analysis, to be the same. It revealed itself so naturally, and seemed to me so
compelling that I am prepared to expect the same solution in all cases of
fetishism. When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I
shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a
substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that
had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost …. the
fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in
and … does not want to give up.13

That is, the fetish is a substitute for the maternal phallus, the fantasy-organ of the
powerful and potentially castrating (rather than castrated) woman. The fetish, then, is
created in an act of defence: Barbara Creed argues that ‘In this context, the fetish stands
in for the vagina dentata—the castrating female organ that the male wishes to disavow.’14
In the context of this discussion, then, the fetish—the peripheral object on the boundaries
of the viewer’s sight—stands in for that frightening, ‘castrating’, difference which it seeks
to obscure.
The argument for the pointe shoe as a kind of vagina dentata is further enhanced by
some understanding of the processes involved in its manufacture and preparation for
performance. Although women dancers began to rise on pointe early in the nineteenth
century,15 the Ž rst reinforced shoes, stiffened with glue, did not appear until the 1860s.
The shoes of contemporary dancers are ‘blocked’—that is, hardened—with paper, rye
 our, hessian and glue in order to achieve their sheath-like toe; sometimes the backs are
actually reinforced with steel for added support. Supplied in relative abundance by the
employing ballet company, a professional dancer’s shoes are constructed for the idio-
syncrasies of each foot. Dancers maintain a loyalty not only to a particular shoe
manufacturer, but also to an individual shoe maker.16
And these precious shoes must be ‘broken in’ with strange but necessary little rituals:
they may be ‘scrunched in a door, stamped on, or {have} their backs “broken” or bent
for more  exibility’;17 Gelsey Kirkland writes of evenings spent ‘hammering out’ pointe
shoes on her living room  oor.18 My point here is that these hard objects, crafted so very
carefully to individual needs and individual shapes, must undergo an extensive process
in order to play their assigned role in achieving, and maintaining, the illusion of a
functional femininity. And there is also something slightly unsettling in this image of
84 K. Carter

svelte women dancers, their bodies so highly trained and tuned, ‘breaking in’ their shoes
with obsessive gusto.
The rituals involved in maintaining the shoes are also considerable: a coat of pancake
make-up is often added in order to dull the sheen of the satin; dripping shellac into the
insides of wilting shoes helps to strengthen them; regular scrubbing with soap and water
sustains, for a very limited time, their appearance. Each pair of shoes will last for several
performances only, and this brief life-span is surely part of their ‘fragile’ mystique. All this
effort is quite aside from the little rituals based upon superstitious beliefs but nevertheless
entrenched in most performers’ lives: never placing the left shoe on before the right, for
example, or choosing to perform on a particular pair of shoes well past their prime for
‘good luck’. Further, it seems that the ghost of the ‘consumption’ of Taglioni’s shoes has
not entirely been laid to rest: Aitken writes that she has in fact passed on many pairs of
used pointe shoes to her fans.19
Shoes and feet have long been seen as invested with ‘magical’ qualities: in particular,
they have had a long association with fertility. This connection is based upon the idea
that the foot ‘mates’ with the fertile earth through the intimate nature of their contact;20
shoes have even been seen to possess aphrodisiacal powers.21 In short, there is a long,
distinctly sexual lineage to the young dance student’s decoration of her bedroom with
representations of pointe shoes, and even perhaps to the professional dancer’s assertive
treatment of her own footwear. It is possible, through Freud’s interpretation of the shoe
as vaginal and Creed’s theorisation of the fetish (here read shoe) as at times representa-
tive of the vagina dentata, in turn to read the pointe shoe as a fetishistic and yet culturally
acceptable vagina dentata. Spurned by men at (almost) all costs, these shoes are feared by
non-dancers and considered, even by women dancers themselves, to be ‘instruments of
torture’. The pain and bleeding associated with their acquisition is treated, by dance
culture, as a necessary rite of passage for young female dance students, and with their
 eshy colour and their unique and highly crafted shape (speciŽ c to each foot at a
professional level), they are personal and idiosyncratic twin vaginal-cofŽ ns whose lure is
dangerous to all, but particularly to those of a different ‘shape’.
With this sexual lineage of shoes in mind, it is worth noting that representations of
pointe shoes appear regularly on greeting cards, picture frames, carry-bags, soaps and so
forth, and that these products are aimed at a speciŽ c market: the pre-pubescent and early
adolescent girl, ballet student or not—for ballet is an artform in which young girls in the
West are expected to be interested. Here the distinctive image of the dancer’s shoes would
seem to be a part standing in for the whole woman dancer, or more correctly for the
fantasy of the woman dancer. Sometimes these pointe shoes are represented as completely
disembodied; sometimes they appear with ‘amputated’ feet and ankles attached. These
amputated feet, still occupying their dancing shoes and apparently still on pointe and
therefore performing, resonate with ‘The Red Shoes’ fairy tale and with the still-popular
Ž lm of the same name.22
It is important to consider the target audience of these various products: the young
woman who participates in their fetishistic appropriation. For girl children, the ‘con-
sumption’ of these images (of the ‘amputated’ feet in particular) is masochistic in the
sense that it invites the children to be participants in the perpetuation of a ‘mutilated’
form of femininity—a mutilated femininity offered as a cultural stepping stone to a more
‘mature’ (marriageable) femininity and a ‘mature’ consumerism. On another level,
however, perhaps this ‘consumption’ also offers a space in which an idealised femininity,
even an excessive femininity, is able to be explored through fantasy and through
mimicry. Such collecting is, for some feminist theorists, a form of female fetishism not
 Consuming the Ballerina 85

compensatory for the lost phallus—as in the male model of fetishism—but rather for an
‘unspeciŽ ed “female loss”’.23
I will be returning later to this issue of ‘female loss’ and fetishism; however for the
moment I wish to engage directly with a number of representations of women dancers’
pointe shoes. I am not speciŽ cally concerned at this point with the disembodied, or
‘amputated’, ‘Red Shoes’-type images, but rather with another category: with represen-
tations of pointe shoes in which—although the dancer herself is not necessarily repre-
sented in the same frame or space—human agency is directly evoked. And I would argue
that it is this agency, this decidedly female agency, which gives these images their power.
A 1993 Australian Ballet program for Don Quixote contained an advertisement for one
of the ballet company’s sponsors, BHP. This image shows a large pile of used pointe
shoes. The caption reads: ‘Every year the Australian Ballet goes through thousands of
pointe shoes. At BHP we’re proud to be footing part of the bill.’ Here the Ž rst thing to
notice is the spent, discarded, abandoned nature of the shoes: they are worn out. If, like
all good fetishes, they may be read as covering over genital difference, of representing
simultaneously both penis and vagina, then this image is fascinating in its ambiguity, for
it is women, and many of them, who have done the discarding here. The women dance
on: the performance charted in the program itself implies this. The message is a
sexualised one which taps into unconscious fears and desires: for the fetishistic gaze of
the audience member, these abandoned shoes imply a demanding, perhaps devouring
sexuality, one which discards its own toy-fetishes regularly. Like the fairy tale of ‘The
Twelve Dancing Princesses’,24 the women’s sexualised behaviour—dancing—is ‘proven’
by the presence of worn-out shoes. With its fantasy of an abandoned and abandoning
sexuality, this image speaks of many women—perhaps the entire corps de ballet of
masculine desire—wearing out the culture’s eroticised objects.
But this discarded quality has a further, historical, and most unfortunate resonance. It
echoes bluntly the images of the piles of shoes collected from concentration camp victims
during World War II. Such a reminder seeps through the sexualised surface of the
advertisement and marks out the link between eroticism and death. Because of their close
association with the human body, and because of their enclosing, protective shape, these
abandoned shoes are, in both cases, a potent metaphor for loss: loss of life, loss of
subjectivity, loss, perhaps, of bodies which had once danced through life. The deserted
shoes, their individuality and intimacy turned now to anonymity, will inevitably raise
questions regarding the circumstances of their abandonment.
Viewed from a different angle, however, the empty shoes featured in the BHP
advertisement touch the early, sadistic impulses of the watching subject who, according
to Klein, once experienced the ‘predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop
out and rob the mother’s body of its good contents’.25 In contrast to this spent, ‘scooped
out’ imagery, Gelsey Kirkland’s autobiography features a photograph of the ballerina in
her bathroom—a photograph in which the foreground is dominated by many pairs of
pointe shoes which appear to be brand new. I would argue that Kirkland is in a sense
empowered by the presence of her ready-to-perform shoes. As fetishistic objects, these
clean, hard shoes evoke not simply the presence of the phallus which they resemble, but
also the fantasy of the maternal phallus which, for Freud, all fetishes replace. Kirkland is
pictured in possession of the ‘magical’ objects which ensure the successful completion of
many more performances.
Another image, also taken from an advertisement placed in an Australian Ballet
program, is more explicitly sexual.26 Here the woman dancer, exhausted from her own
sexualised dance, is framed for the viewer with her thighs wide apart; her single
86 K. Carter

discarded pointe shoe aimed suggestively close to her genitals. This image would seem
to  aunt the idea that the pointe shoe stands in for the phallus; here I would suggest,
however, a further twist: that the  eshy shoe could also be read as the internal transformed
into the external; the ‘invisible’—the woman’s genitals—made visible in the shape of the
sheath-like shoe.
In the advertisement for Vuitton luggage which appeared in Australian Vogue Living
(see Ž g. 1),27 it is by contrast the autonomy, the independence of the owner of these shoes
which the viewer admires. It is these inanimate objects—supported by the luggage itself
and by the setting—which convey a sense of talent, opulence and heavy exoticism, along
with a sense of absence. It is the absent Ž gure whose story is told by the representative
objects—her shoes. The part stands in for the whole; the object for the (absent) mother.
And this advertisement is aimed almost exclusively at women: women will both identify
with the absent dancer and mourn her loss; desire her presence. In reading this
‘exchange’ between absent woman and woman viewer, I wish to cite Teresa de Lauretis’s
suggestion that for the female subject, the ‘castration’ which engenders fetishism is not
the loss of the maternal phallus or even the loss of the pre-Oedipal mother’s body, but
rather the loss of the subject’s own body-ego.28 That is, ‘castration’ is a phallic re-writing of, ‘a
primary narcissistic loss of body-image, a lack of being’.29
But this of course opens up the question of whether or not women can be ‘fetishists’
in the true—that is, psychoanalytically ‘true’—sense of the term, and if so what
manifestations this form of perversity might take. The question of women and fetishism
has remained largely a mystery for psychoanalysis; when they have been considered,
women have conventionally been seen to exhibit their fetishistic tendencies upon the
surfaces of their own bodies. Such ‘fetishism’ is inevitably described with reference to the
‘lost’ phallus. For example Jacob Arlow writes that:
In women, fetishism … is quite rare. Perhaps this may be connected with the
fact, as revealed in clinical experience, that women in their mode of dress may
 aunt an illusory penis through many forms of self-decoration—men’s clothes,
massive jewelry, a penchant for extraordinary hats, and the like.30
As a number of theorists have noted, there is a link between this kind of ‘perverse’
devotion to acting out an idealised role and the everyday affectation of ‘feminine’
practices. 31 There is, in short, a connection between fetishism and masquerade,32 and this
is the light in which, perhaps, one needs to consider the industry built around the
perpetuation of the ballerina’s image. To affect the part of a Giselle or an Odette, to
masquerade as ‘a ballerina’, partly through the accumulation of, and self-decoration
with, the various components of her appearance which are so unique (pointe shoes, pink
tights, short or Romantic tutu, a highly stylised stage make-up and hair drawn back into
a severe bun)—this is the fetishistic goal of almost every female ballet student.
De Lauretis has argued that it is possible to read female fetishistic practices as attempts
to reinstate a lost female body, a female body which, although associated with the
maternal body, is also for female subjects in a sense the self. The loss of this body thus
represents the ‘castration’ of self with which every individual is faced.33 Female fetishism
is by this reading not simply an attempt to ‘have’ or to ‘be’ the phallus (even the ‘phallus’
of the mother) as more conventional readings would argue. For de Lauretis, female
fetishism—and here she includes excessive masquerades of femininity—reinstates the
‘lost’ female body in an attempt to ward off a loss of being. Though she locates her
arguments concerning female fetishism in terms of lesbian desire, it would seem possible
to extend this in order to theorise, at least speculatively, other kinds of female-to-female
 Consuming the Ballerina
87

FIGURE 1. ‘Louis Vuitton. The Art of Travel’, Vogue Living (Australia), December 1988/January 1989.
88 K. Carter

desiring. For de Lauretis, ‘the fantasmatic image of a feminine body lost/denied by

castration {is} recovered through the fetish, through another woman’;34 and, even more
importantly for the present argument, ‘She {this fantasmatic fetishistic image} appears to
be something of a dream Ž gure, more a projection of a fantasy, than a real woman’.35
This ‘dream Ž gure’ of female fetishism is a Ž gure which bears a striking resemblance to
the ‘dream’ heroines of ballet: uncanny, ghostly, ‘lost’ creatures who  oat through the
dreams of so many female ballet students, and across so many stages in the Western
world. I would argue that it is through a highly stylised fetishistic mimicry that this Ž gure
is reinstated, appropriated through a performance of bodily movements and actions
which connect dancer to maternal dream Ž gure. Pointe shoes themselves play a very
important role in this scenario, functioning metonymically as ‘consumable’ fetishistic
objects, their cultural lineage renewed and re-asserted with each generation of dance
students.
Before concluding the present discussion, I would like to open out further some of the
issues raised by the association traced here between women, dance, and masquerade.36
For women dancers and dance students, the collection and worship of fetishistic objects,
and the fetishistic mimicry of speciŽ c practices, are not only available, they are
institutionally enshrined in the regimented training and practice of their art. Indeed, considering de
Lauretis’s argument once again, one might wish to speculate upon the practice of dance
itself—and perhaps other bodily practices which are largely communicated through
mimicry—as attempts to regain the lost, primary body-image: to ward off a lack of being.
I suggest this because dance offers access to a kind of mimicked power which is inscribed
in the bodies of the dancers themselves.
For the woman dancer, masquerade, dressing up, and acting up are not only fetishistic
events which take place on the surface of the  esh, they are actions which shape bodies,
behaviours, and psychological states. Larry Vincent, a former dancer and now medical
practitioner, has argued that the distinctively lean-hipped, pre-pubescent-like physique of
the mature woman dancer is the result of a ‘hormonal holding pattern’ which is
maintained through a combination of ‘sub-anorectic’ behaviour and rigorous training.37
Dance training and the institutional pressures to attain/maintain a sylph-like physique
produce a female body which is thus arrested at a point prior to puberty; in the late
twentieth century this dancing body is also an excessively slim body with an absent or
abnormal menstrual cycle.
In other words, classical ballet and its attendant masquerade of the sylph-like
‘ballerina’ roles contains a ‘performance’ of femininity which produces and reproduces the
shape of the ballerina for our fetishistic consumption as viewers; for the dancer, a
successful masquerade as ‘a sylph’ produces a consumable, ethereal, and employable
body. Western culture supports this cycle by encouraging ballet as a ‘feminine’ pastime
for young girls; it then celebrates this mimicry by enshrouding the ballet student with
consumer imagery of herself as—returning once again to the issue of the pointe
shoe—‘amputated’, in some ways empowered, and yet always inscribed as ‘castrated’ by
paternal law. ‘Consuming’ the ballerina in this sense is perhaps not so very different from
the ritualistic consumption of Taglioni’s shoes: both are acts of fetishism which attempt
to draw the ‘magic’ of the idealised female Ž gure into the consuming subject—and both
are acts haunted by her loss.
Classical ballet appears to tap into the desire of many young women to act out an
idealised and culturally privileged version of ‘femininity’: the success of this fetishistic
masquerade is evidenced in the huge number of girls enrolled in ballet schools and by
healthy dance audiences (mostly female) for the ‘classical’ repertoire. Perhaps there is
 Consuming the Ballerina 89

indeed a sense in which a ‘lack of being’ is warded off by the participation in this
performance of femininity by both dancer and audience—warded off by the donning of
and the consumption of the ‘torturous’ shoes, the individually-crafted shoes, the dream
‘Red Shoes’ of artistic ambition. Amongst the distinctive ‘trademarks’ of the ballerina’s
appearance, the pointe shoe resonates as a culturally potent sign, conveying multiple
layers of signiŽ cation and inviting the gaze of the feminist critic who is interested in the
‘acting out’ of women’s desires. For the many girls and women, however, who at one
stage in their lives will either wear, covert (for themselves or for their daughters),
appropriate, or in some way consume its cultural ‘magic’, the pointe shoe remains a rich
metaphor for fantastic realms, ‘fantasy’ careers, and sylph-like female bodies.

NOTES
1. Walter Sorell, Dance in its Time (Columbia University Press) New York, 1986, p. 211. Unfortunately Sorell
does not give a reference for this story.
2. An earlier version of this article appeared as Chapter Eight of my doctoral thesis. See Keryn Carter,
‘Performing the Feminine: Women, Narrative, Dance’, School of English, La Trobe University, 1995. A
draft version was also given as a paper at the ‘Feminism in Transit’ Conference, Monash University, 6
June 1995.
3. Taglioni’s ballet ‘slippers’ were not, of course, identical to those of the contemporary woman dancer (see
discussion below); this does not, however, dilute the strength of my argument.
4. Charles W. Socarides, The Preodeipal Origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions (International
University Press) Madison, 1988, p. 281.
5. Lethonee Jones, ‘Fetishes and Fetishism in Foods and Eating’ in Ray B. Browne (ed.) Objects of Special
Devotion: Fetishism in Popular Culture (Bowling Green Popular Press) Bowling Green, 1982, p. 242.
6. Melanie Klein, ‘A Study of Envy and Gratitude’ (1956) in Juliet Mitchell (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein,
(Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 211.
7. Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego’ (1930) in The Selected
Melanie Klein, p. 96.
8. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905) in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 67.
9. Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, p. 67n. Elsewhere Freud also notes that ‘Shoes and
slippers are {symbols for} female genitals’ (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17) (Penguin)
Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 191, Ž rst emphasis mine).
10. Perhaps the most successful example of this is to be found in Les Ballets Trokadero de Monte Carlo, an all-male
ballet company which offers ‘loving parodies’ of the canonical repertory. See Judith Lynne Hanna’s
discussion of its work in Dance, Sex and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, DeŽance, and Desire (University of
Chicago Press) Chicago, 1988, pp. 239–40.
11. Christine Aitken, ‘These Instruments of Torture’ in Dance and Dancers, no. 483, 1990, p. 21.
12. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ (1927) in On Sexuality (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 356.
13. Freud, ‘Fetishism’, pp. 351–2, my emphasis.
14. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge) London, 1993, p. 116.
15. There is some debate about who was the Ž rst ballerina to rise on pointe: it was probably not Taglioni,
although she is widely credited with this innovation (Aitken, ‘These Instruments of Torture’, p. 21).
16. Aitken, ‘These Instruments of Torture’, pp. 23, 21.
17. Aitken, ‘These Instruments of Torture’, p. 24.
18. Gelsey Kirkland (with Greg Lawrence), Dancing on my Grave (1986) (Penguin) London, 1988, p. 85.
19. Aitken, ‘These Instruments of Torture’, pp. 24, 25.
20. William A. Rosi, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe (Routledge and Kegan Paul) London, 1977, p. 62.
21. Rosi, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, p. 15.
22. For an extended reading of both ‘The Red Shoes’ fairy tale and Ž lm, see Keryn Carter, ‘Cinderella’s
Sisters and The Red Shoes’, forthcoming in Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays.
23. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Indiana University Press)
Bloomington, 1994, p. 274, my emphasis. Here de Lauretis cites Emily Apter’s Feminizing the Fetish:
Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Cornell University Press) Ithaca, 1991.
90 K. Carter

24. For a discussion of this fairy tale, and other ‘shoe’ tales, see Keryn Carter, ‘Cinderella’s Sisters and The
Red Shoes’.
25. Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’ in The Selected Melanie Klein, p. 183.
26. Advertisement for DuPont which appeared in the 1992 Australian Ballet programme for Nutcracker.
27. Vogue Living (Australia), December 1988/January 1989, pp. 10–11. Reproduced with the permission of
Louis Vuitton.
28. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, p. 243.
29. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, p. xviii.
30. Jacob A. Arlow, ‘Derivative Manifestations of Perversions’ in Gerald I. Fogel and Wayne A. Myers (eds),
Perversions and Near-Perversions in Clinical Practice (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1991, p. 70.
31. See, for example, Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
no. 10, 1929; also Jaques Lacan, ‘The SigniŽ cation of the Phallus’ in Écrits: a Selection, Alan Sheridan
(trans.) (WW Norton) New York, 1977.
32. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 270.
33. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 275.
34. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 281.
35. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 281.
36. For a more detailed discussion of these connections, see the Ž nal chapter of ‘Performing the Feminine:
Women, Narrative, Dance’.
37. Although Vincent develops this argument in his Competing with the Sylph: Dancers and the Pursuit of the Ideal
Body Form ((Anders and McMeel) Kansas City, 1979), his discussion is based upon a medical study in
which he was one of the researchers. See Rose E. Frisch, Grace Wysak, and Larry Vincent, ‘Delayed
Menarche and Amenorrhea in Ballet Dancers’ in New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 303, no. 1, 1980,
pp. 17–19.