Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life

by Clare Croft

Overview

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478031055
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/29/2024
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Clare Croft is Associate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, author of Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange, and editor of Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. She Was a Critic
Interruption 1: Up on the Roof
2. She Was an Audience
Interruption 2: Born of Paper
3. She Was a Lesbian Feminist
Interruption 3: We Can Hear You: Reading with the Body
4. She Was a Writer
Last Sentence: An Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Clare Croft’s book is a love letter to Jill Johnston, an ode to the lesbian feminist potential that unfurled with dance investigations in the 1960s, a call for writing as a kind of touching through time, pleasure, juxtapositions, and passionate political imaginings. Gorgeously written and deeply researched, it puts the reader in a richly woven world of thinkers and ideas about what bodies in motion can upend when in sync with feminist possibility. It has an ease, a slouch, and funny adjacencies to queer pleasures and adamancies that helps us sense and move more queerly.

Jennifer Monson

Jill Johnston in Motion is a smart and engaging read that sheds light on one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Clare Croft tells a compelling story about Jill Johnston’s transition from dancer to dance critic to feminist cultural critic over the course of her life as a writer. With remarkable care, Croft not only underscores the importance of Johnston’s contributions to dance and feminist history, she also demonstrates how Johnston’s writing was itself an embodied practice and performance. This important book will be a primary text for performance studies and gender and sexuality studies.

Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire - Ricardo Montez

"These are just such good books; I am boggled by them. Anyone who dances, thinks about dance, or writes about dance should read Croft’s book, and simultaneously take to bed the Reader, a collection of Johnston’s legendary pieces."

WendyPerron.com - Elizabeth Zimmer

Clare Croft’s book is a love letter to Jill Johnston, an ode to the lesbian feminist potential that unfurled with dance investigations in the 1960s, a call for writing as a kind of touching through time, pleasure, juxtapositions, and passionate political imaginings. Gorgeously written and deeply researched, it puts the reader in a richly woven world of thinkers and ideas about what bodies in motion can upend when in sync with feminist possibility. It has an ease, a slouch, and funny adjacencies to queer pleasures and adamancies that helps us sense and move more queerly.”—Jennifer Monson, Professor of Dance, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“Jill Johnston in Motion is a smart and engaging read that sheds light on one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Clare Croft tells a compelling story about Jill Johnston’s transition from dancer to dance critic to feminist cultural critic over the course of her life as a writer. With remarkable care, Croft not only underscores the importance of Johnston’s contributions to dance and feminist history, she also demonstrates how Johnston’s writing was itself an embodied practice and performance. This important book will be a primary text for performance studies and gender and sexuality studies.”—Ricardo Montez, author of, Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire

"These are just such good books; I am boggled by them. Anyone who dances, thinks about dance, or writes about dance should read Croft’s book, and simultaneously take to bed the Reader, a collection of Johnston’s legendary pieces."—Elizabeth Zimmer, WendyPerron.com

"Through the synthesizing project of the Reader and the analysis of Johnston’s multi-faceted persona and writings in Jill Johnston in Motion, Croft has given us the gift of Johnston’s full radical power while also giving Johnston her due, putting her in context with her more famous peers like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde. Jill Johnston in Motion also has a creative structure that lets Croft, and her research process, enter the narrative, as well as letters from many of Johnston’s Village Voice readers. Gaps in the archives are felt, and filled, with these individual experiences."—Candice Thompson, Fjord

"Without neglecting the contradictions and blind spots in Johnston’s work, Croft deftly examines the centrality of the body in her queerness and writing practice and considers writing (and reading) as embodied acts."—Natalie Haddad, Hyperallergic

"To read Croft’s analysis alongside of Johnston’s writing is a deep pleasure and an excellent learning resource. . . . Croft’s analysis plus anthology shines a spotlight on the intersections of Johnston’s various strengths and audiences. This pair of books presents the breadth of Johnston’s work to a more diverse audience that speaks across the fields of dance studies, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, criticism, and writing."—J Dellecave, Dance Chronicle

From the Publisher

"Through the synthesizing project of the Reader and the analysis of Johnston’s multi-faceted persona and writings in Jill Johnston in Motion, Croft has given us the gift of Johnston’s full radical power while also giving Johnston her due, putting her in context with her more famous peers like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde. Jill Johnston in Motion also has a creative structure that lets Croft, and her research process, enter the narrative, as well as letters from many of Johnston’s Village Voice readers. Gaps in the archives are felt, and filled, with these individual experiences."

Fjord - Candice Thompson