Hello and welcome to Queer is Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world

and throughout time.

I'm Irene.

I'm Alice.

And I'm Eli.

And today I'll be talking about Isadora Duncan, a dancer from the turn of the 20th century

who performed throughout America and Europe.

But... Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Bonorong Boon-Wong people of the Kulin Nation on whose land we record this podcast. We pay our respects to their elders past and present

and acknowledge them as the custodians of an oral tradition far older than this

podcast. I will need to provide some content warnings for this episode. It contains mention of

death in car accidents, miscarriage and the deaths of children, alcoholism, depression and suicide,

racism against African American people. World War I is here, and there is one fairly explicit description

of sex. There's also a brief mention of domestic violence. If you don't want to listen to any of that,

feel free to skip this episode. There are lots of other episodes. I'm sure you'll find one. I do kind of

have a sources section here, but it's relatively brief. Isadora was extremely famous, not all that long ago, and there are so many sources,

both primary and secondary, about her life, just so many.

So some of the key sources I've used included Isadora's own autobiography.

Oh, well, that's, you know, both handy and probably horrendously inaccurate.

Yeah, like, deeply unhandy, but very illustrative, you know, both handy and probably horrendously inaccurate. Yeah, exactly.

Like, deeply unhandy, but very illustrative, I feel like, is probably how it is.

Like, it's one of those things that's more illustrative of her character and how she'd like to be perceived

than that you can necessarily draw from and be like, yeah, these are the things that happened in her life.

...