Black Swan, White Nose

This chapter recasts the Jewish woman as female monster through an analysis of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). Against the damaging pressures of professional dance on the female psyche, the film recasts the White Swan and Black Swan roles as monstrous representations of the Jewish woman as ethnic Other and sexual deviant. In a significant counterpart to the funny girls discussed in the previous chapters, Black Swan uses ballet to appropriate social and political identities with tenuous relationships to the mainstream and reveals how these appropriations amount to an ultimate domestication of the very identities the film puts forward for thrilling appeal.