Abstract

For the generation of feminists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, female beauty was suspect, for it simply pandered to male desire. And for the modernist artists of that period, beauty in art had long since been banished. but for Armitage's generation, already empowered by the political gains of feminism on the one hand, and engaged in a postmodernist challenge to the values of artistic modernism on the other, beauty in art and in the female body could once again be appreciated. If Armitage was drawn, as a child, to the beauty and glamour of ballet, her own interventions into the history of the art form have given that beauty a new, more complex face. Her unabashed love of ballet's beauty (especially its female beauty) and its erotic display, combined with her intelligent interrogation of the grounds for that beauty, her historical references, and her witty irreverence, wickedly and triumphantly reclaim the art form for our post-feminist times.