A Case in Pointe: Romance and Regimentation at the New York City Ballet.

This article analyzes the ballet dancer's pointe shoe as a technology of artistic production and bodily discipline. Drawing on oral histories, memoirs, dance journals, advertisements, and other archival materials, it demonstrates that the shoe utilized by dancers at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet was not the quintessentially Romantic entity it is so often presumed to be. Instead, it emerged from uniquely twentieth-century systems of labor and production, and it was used to alter dancers' bodies and professional lives in particularly modern ways. The article explores not only the substance of these changes but also the ways in which Balanchine's artistic oeuvre was inextricably intertwined with the material technologies he employed and, more broadly, how the history of technology and the history of dance can productively inform one another. Fundamentally, this article recasts Balanchine, seeing him not as a disconnected artist but as an eager participant in the twentieth-century national romance with American technology.

Half a Man: The Symbolism and Science of Paraplegic Impotence in World War II America.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, more than 600,000 men returned to the United States with long-term disabilities, profoundly destabilizing the definitions, representations, and experiences of male sexuality in America. By examining an oft-neglected 1950 film, The Men, along with medical, personal, and popular accounts of impotence in paralyzed World War II veterans, this essay excavates the contours of that change and its attendant anxieties. While previous scholarship on film and sexuality in the postwar period has focused on women's experiences, we broaden the analytical lens to provide a fuller picture of the various meanings of male sexuality, especially disabled heterosexuality. In postwar America, the paralyzed veteran created a temporary fissure in conventional discussions of the gendered body, a moment when the "normality" and performative features of the male body could not be assumed but rather had to be actively defined. To many veterans, and to the medical men who treated them, sexual reproduction--not function-became the ultimate signifier of remasculinization.