The Body in Time looks at two different genres in relation to the construction of femininity in late nineteenth-century France: Degas's representation of ballet dancers and the transforming tradition of female portraiture. Class, gender, power, and agency are at stake in both arenas, but they play themselves out in different ways via different pictorial languages.

Degas's depictions of anonymous young female ballerinas at the Paris Opera reflect his fascination with the physical exertions and prosaic setting of the dancer's sexualized body. Unlike the standard Romantic...