The purpose of this study was to examine and interpret how professional, female ballet dancers understand and describe the influences that the field of professional ballet, including the inherent ideologies in the field, has had upon their perceptions of their identities. By asking female dancers to reflect upon and describe their experiences, the intention was to come to an understanding of what it means to be a professional ballet dancer and the ways in which female ballet dancers inscribe their own subjectivities, and how they are inscribed by others, on a daily basis. Including female dancers' voices into the theoretical dialogues of critical scholarship may lead toward greater understandings of the possible intersections between the existing theoretical discourse on and the lived experiences of women in ballet.

Sixteen professional ballet dancers who perform(ed) with regional, national, and internationally acclaimed ballet companies participated in this study. Research participants represented different life-stages and levels of experience in the field of professional ballet. The novice group included dancers who had 1-3 years of experience as professional ballet dancers, the experienced group had more than three years of experience as professional ballet dancers, and the retired group represented women who had retired from the field. Each dancer participated in an individual face-to-face or phone interview that lasted one to three hours in length. Using grounded theory as a methodology, data was analyzed in order to discover the commonalities between the dancers' experience. The theory generated from the data illustrated how the identities of this particular group of female ballet dancers evolved during and after their careers.

The perspective of the world that the dancers developed while working in the field of professional ballet shaped their personal epistemologies, which transformed as their opinions of the field changed. The dancers' definitions of self and vocation fell into three different categories, perceptual spaces that represented their transitioning epistemologies: the space of becoming marked their socialization into ballet culture; the space of conflict characterized their questioning of the institution of ballet; and the space of transition represented their choice to reject the influences of ballet's ideologies on their lives.