Post on 14-May-2023
Queer Embodiment in Burlesque: Disidentifying with the Heteronormative
Hegemony
Swetank Gupta
MA English: 1850 to Present King’s College London
September 2015
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments 2
Abstract
3
Queer Embodiment in Burlesque: Disidentifying with the Heteronormative Hegemony
1. Burlesque! But Why?
4
2. Humor Me! 13
3. Drag Sex Into Gender: Queer, Isn’t It? 18
4. Show Me(:) The Money(?) 32
5. My Body, Every(-)Body! 37
6. What’s The Point?
48
Bibliography 50
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has been a very fulfilling aspect of my time at King’s College London as it
has allowed me to combine my personal and academic interests and provided me with significant
freedom to shape it in the format it currently exists. It goes without saying, but I would like to
thank my supervisor, Professor Alan Read for his enthusiastic involvement in the subject, his
gentle steering of my ideas into a coherent argument and his insights that helped me get through
complicated concepts with relative ease. I am immensely thankful to Kaitlyn Regehr, Ph.D.
candidate in the English department at King’s, whose expertise in the subject matter led to
invaluable advice and recommendations, without which this dissertation would not have been as
successful. I would also like to thank Dr. Suchitra Mathur, Associate Professor, IIT Kanpur for
her time, patience and acting as a sounding board for my outlandish ideas and reigning me in.
I would like to thank several other people, who helped me in no small measure and
whose contributions to this project were invaluable pieces to a puzzle I have been trying to solve
for close to a year. In no particular order, I express my gratitude to, Dr Ian Henderson, Dr Hector
Kollias, Dr Georgina Guy, Dr Kelina Gotman, Prof Mark Turner, Ms Laura Douglas and Mr
Howard Wilmot. Every one of them has contributed to various aspects of this dissertation, and it
would not be complete without their support and help. I hope to be able to return the favor
someday. It has been an absolute pleasure.
Swetank Gupta MA Candidate Department of English King’s College London August 2015
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ABSTRACT
This paper is an investigation of how burlesque performances provide a stage for queer
representations and queering of the hegemonic heteronormative representational system, the
current dominant paradigm. This queering of gendered normativity is achieved through attempts
at de-essentializing identities of gender, sex, sexual preference, and body types as incorporated in
the contemporary cultural set up within a binary, hierarchical sex-gender framework of social
existence. This paper argues that burlesque aims to realize this objective using a non-
confrontational approach of disidentification, a strategy that simultaneously conforms and
contradicts the archetypical socio-cultural setup and its resultant ideological structures, to
attempt to transform the constructed logic from within the system. Through deconstruction of
gendered roles, sexed bodies and heteronormative assumptions, burlesque performances defy the
hegemony of a normalizing, if not discriminatory, social existence, arguing for an egalitarian
mode of social setup without a utopian fantasy. It argues for inclusion of counter-normative
identities through employment of its constitutive elements of humor and tease in the service of a
social agenda that goes beyond assimilative or ideological identity politics and offers an alternate
model that needs to be assessed for sustainability on a larger scale. Burlesque, as discussed in
this paper, provides an alternate methodology to more radical approaches for subjectification of
minoritarian counter-normative identities.
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BURLESQUE! BUT WHY?
What is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.1
An Indian, a French and a Swede walk into Bangkok’s red light district on a summer
evening. A little nervous of overt marketing, they make their way through Soi Cowboy,
popularly perceived by locals to be more laidback than Nana Plaza and Patpong, the other two
red light districts in the city. The unlikely threesome gawk at the Go-Go bars that seem to stretch
till infinity on that short 150m walk, growing in confidence as they dive deeper, work up the
courage to get a drink, get groped by barely legal Asian (they can’t all be Thai, can they?) girls
employed to lure customers in, become unsuspecting witnesses to the famed Ping Pong show,
and as is appropriate for all self-respecting members of the educated middle class imbued with
good social values, all three are appropriately fascinated by the introduction to the underbelly of
the sex trade and appalled at the institutionalized exploitation of the poor, helpless girls that
suffer the indignities at the hands of tourists with less pious intentions than theirs. They spend
four righteous hours on that 150m stretch. This, in addition to the uncomfortable, squirming
minute they spent at Silom Soi 2 earlier that evening, a street that traditionally caters to gay men.
“What’s the point?” they asked of the prospect of exploring that street, while being carefully
guarded against the lustful gazes of, they presume, the legendary ladyboys of Thailand, those
they politely refer to as people with alternate sexualities, but exhale a sigh of ‘freaks’ as they
back off from the entrance. These are not homophobic people, they are socially and politically
1 Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell Press, 1986), p. 5.
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liberal, they have gay best friends, they attend the Pride Parades with pride but, on that street, the
question was, “What’s the point?”
I am the Indian in the story. This dissertation is an output of that question asked in
August 2014, almost a refrain at this juncture: “What’s the point?” None of us was going to
procure the services of the girls on Soi Cowboy either, the visit was in the name of exploring the
famous landmarks of Bangkok and these were some of them, so that should really have been the
point. Yet it wasn’t. Since then, I have constantly wondered what the response to that question is,
or why does it arise at all. Over the years I have been able to surround myself with left-leaning,
like-minded people who do not, or at least genuinely believe that they do not discriminate; are
comfortable with non-normative life choices and strongly oppose any vilification of the
‘outsiders’ that calls into question the absolute equality of all human beings. I count myself
among them. Nonetheless, based on my personal experiences and the sense of discomfort I have
observed people undergo in Bangkok and other similar situations, I have been forced to
reconsider this egalitarian agenda that we claim to advance.
My hypothesis is that all of us, the class of people I have described above, certainly
believe what we say, but those claims apply only insofar as all interactions take place within the
framework of heteronormativity as the dominant paradigm, with existing hierarchical binary
structures of male/female, man/woman, and heterosexual/homosexual that provide us with the
comfort of familiarity. In an inverted setting, as was the case on Silom Soi 2 in Bangkok, a
microcosm of what a world primarily comprised of (what we conveniently describe as)
‘alternate’ lifestyles or sexualities or bodies, we no longer occupy the vantage point of the
socially powerful. It exposes our fears, so far neatly ensconced in the layers of rational thought.
As opposed to the more blatant and publicly visible homophobia, I find this to be a more
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insidious form of queerphobia, or non-heteronormative-phobia, to use a rather ungainly
expression, much like the feelings it evokes since those that suffer from it are themselves in
denial. Laplanche and Pontalis write that if assimilation is to occur (in this case, of the normative
into the counternormative), it is constituted through a series of identifications that formulate the
subjective identity.2 Since our society is largely structured around heteronormativity, even the
well meaning amongst us find ourselves at a loss on how to conduct ourselves when that
structure is upended. The reason, Jose Muñoz Esteban writes, of ‘what stops identification from
happening is always the ideological restrictions implicit in an identificatory site.’3 This is where I
find burlesque to be a relevant social phenomenon in addition to its contribution to performance
arts. Burlesque performances allow foregrounding of marginalized sex-gender based identities,
and
…the importance of such public and semipublic enactments of the hybrid self
cannot be undervalued in relation to the formation of counterpublics that contest
the hegemonic supremacy of the majoritarian public sphere… [and] offer the
minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and thus seize social
agency.4
Burlesque, as a performance genre, is difficult to define as a self-contained term. With origins in
Italian commedia dell’arte, it started as a satirical production of classical theatre in the mid-
sixteenth century, spawning such forms as carnivals, fairs and the circus.5 For the purposes of
this dissertation, I shall use burlesque as an all-inclusive term constituted by historical
2 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 206. 3 Jose Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis & London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999), p. 7. 4 Muñoz, p. 1. 5 Jacki Willson, The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), p. 155.
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movements, contemporary re-imaginings, and inspired spin-offs. Classical, or conventional,
burlesque tradition is traced through its origins from Lydia Thompson’s success and fame in
Great Britain that led to her invitation across the Atlantic to pioneer the burlesque scene in New
York and the metropolitan United States in the mid-nineteenth century with her troupe of British
Blondes, until its decline in the mid-twentieth century, covering the golden era of burlesque
during the Great Depression, as described in Robert C. Allen’s Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque
and American Culture. Neo-burlesque, emerging as a revivalist movement in the 1990s United
States and moving back across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, has further created an
inclusive community of performers and audiences who have gladly appropriated performance
genres including, but not limited to, drag, boylesque, queerlesque and go-go dancing into the fold
of burlesque.
Since I use a fairly broad-ranging definition of what constitutes burlesque, it becomes a
difficult problem to isolate common structural elements to performances that allow all these
different forms of performance arts to be classified together. Michelle Baldwin, in Burlesque and
the New Bump-n-grind, argues that the foundational pillars of burlesque are humor and tease.
She quotes a male burlesque performer, Tigger, explaining it as ‘if it's sexuality with a wink and
something over the top, then it probably counts as burlesque’.6 Humor is achieved through
techniques of exaggeration, inversion of expectations and audience involvement; tease is
employed through extravagant, if revealing, costumes, and post the 1920s, through some form of
stripping, though almost never completely and only as a means to talk about sexuality, and not
sexual gratification. It is an important distinction for this project to situate burlesque within the
purview of the erotic in that context, rather than the pornographic. Susan Sontag, in her essay
6 Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque {and the New Bump-n-Grind} (Denver: Speck Press, 2004), p. 117.
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The Pornographic Imagination, writes that ‘pornography still possesses only one intention’,7
what she calls inducing sexual excitement. Sontag claims that pornographic material, and the
resulting reaction is driven by the ‘prospect of action… conceived as a set of sexual exchanges’.8
No such imperative exists in the world of burlesque where the performers are hardly passive sex-
objects as pornographic characters tend to be, but rather empowered subjects driving a fantasy
never expected to come to fruition, an act that celebrates rather than titillates.
I am interested in two specific aspects of burlesque: (a) that it is socially and culturally
transgressive, positioning it outside the normative; and (b) it is highly adaptive and malleable,
altering its existence based on the shifting moral compass of the societies it operates within.
(a) Robert C. Allen credited burlesque, from its first queen Lydia Thompson’s ‘Golden
Girls’ of the 1860s to the last, Lili St. Cyr in the 1950s, with flouting ‘the right of
bourgeois culture to determine the propriety of public discourse. Burlesque reveled in its
illegitimacy’. 9 Extrapolating this to my personal experiences during the course of
research for this project, the perception of people outside academia and the performance
community regarding burlesque oscillates between salaciousness and sexual deviancy. As
a heterosexual male, if I attended a show with female performers, I must have been doing
so for a more publicly accepted form of gratification as opposed to strip clubs, I was told.
If I attended (God forbid actually enjoyed it) drag shows or boylesque, with any form of
male nudity, I was either pinned as a closeted (or still unaware at 30 years old) gay or
simply peculiar. While these observations comply with heteronormative thinking, they
also highlight the importance of burlesque as a space where sexuality and bodies are
7 Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination” in Georges Bataille: Story of the Eye, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1979), p. 87. 8 Sontag, pp. 111-112. 9 Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 147.
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celebrated without agenda or expectation of (sexual) fulfillment. Stallybrass and White’s
statement, with which I open this paper, becomes directly applicable to burlesque, a
socially peripheral art form that takes on a symbolic significance in foregrounding
prejudice to other forms of lived experiences which are currently necessarily
transgressive, marginalized and relegated to survive (or flourish) on the fringes of social
boundaries, outside the line of sight of those that regulate the societal order, pronouncing
them illegitimate and forcing them underground.
(b) Structurally, burlesque has been an extremely fluid form of performance, reinventing
itself out of financial considerations, out of the need to cater to a different class of
audiences, out of a necessity to skirt legal and political crackdowns, or out of a desire to
nurture socio-cultural debates on identity and self. From Victorian theatre to the legging
lasses of New York, from cooch dancing to Michael B. Leavitt’s vaudeville shows,
striptease, tassel twirling, and drag, it has entrenched itself quite strongly with the circus
and variety show formats, along with cabaret.10 Leslie Zemeckis provides us an insight
on how deeply entrenched burlesque is in our contemporary lives, whether we realize it
or not. She describes that ‘reality television is burlesque, whether it is intended to be or
not. The “housewives” are burlesque. Lady Gaga is pure burlesque…as are Katy Perry,
Madonna, Bette Midler, and RuPaul. Rappers are burlesque with their lyrics and their big
diamonds and their baggy pants’.11 The takeaway here is that the burlesque culture is
pervasive, and as much as it lies on the outside, looking in from the margins, its format
and content transforms as the definitions of normativity evolve with time and geography.
10 Ann Corio with Joseph DiMona, This Was Burlesque (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968), p. 30. 11 Leslie Zemeckis, Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014), Ebook Library [Accessed 29 April 2015], p. 524.
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Annamarie Jagose writes of the term queer that:
queer is very much a category in the process of formation. It is not simply that
queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its
definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.12
She might as well be talking about burlesque. Queer, like burlesque, is used here as an all-
encompassing term for the off-normal or counter-normative, referring to everything that it has
come to represent for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Transsexual, Queer & Intersex
(LGBTQI) community confronting issues related to critiques of sex-gender system and identities
outside that system, sexual preference and transgressive desires, as well as the socio-political
power relations of sexuality. I further use it to include different body types when situated outside
the normal at a given moment in time. Given the elasticity of what queer represents and of the
forms that burlesque can assume, I find burlesque to be an apt vehicle for performances that can
address the social impact of the queer world, or to borrow Muñoz’s figuration, of identities-in-
difference because ‘counterpublic performances let us imagine [alternate] models of social
relations’.13
I had the good fortune of attending several performances at the 9th Annual London
Burlesque Festival, which turned out to be an excellent platform to understand the contemporary
world of (neo-)burlesque since artists from around the world are invited to perform, providing a
bird’s eye view of the global burlesque scene. Most shows follow a similar structure of a series
of performances by individual burlesque artists strung together by a compere, generally a
burlesque artist herself, who seems to have taken over the role of the baggy-pants comics in
conventional burlesque. In the coming sections, I will look at live performances I have attended,
12 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 1. 13 Muñoz, p. 33.
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as well as written documentation and videos of past performances to discuss how they support
my claim of burlesque acting as an enabler to queering of dichotomous social identities, more
specifically how they allow for de-essentializing of the link between the cultural notions of
masculinity/femininity and the male/female identities. It is important to note that any use of such
widely (ab)used terms as ‘enabling’ and ‘empowerment’ are meant to denote an organic
movement of self-formation in question as opposed to an external validation from society that
claims to ‘empower’ the countercultural in a regulated manner. To this extent, burlesque
becomes a defiant response to externally imposed frameworks constructed on an essentialist
approach to realization of self. I will categorize the performances I analyze along temporal lines,
classifying anything pre-1990 as burlesque and everything post-1990 as neo-burlesque, insofar as
these particular performances can be said to represent the entire canon of work constituting these
two terms. During the course of this dissertation, I will attribute several characteristics to
burlesque, including its ability to subvert and adapt. What I truly mean, of course, is that it is the
community of burlesque artists, performers and producers who possess these characteristics, and
even those are a result of my reading of burlesque and not necessarily always claimed by them.
Thus, for the ease of communication, when I write that burlesque critiques the sex-gender
system, I imply that the burlesque community creates performances which I read as a text and
interpret its structure or content to be critiquing the sex-gender system, regardless of authorial
intent. Here I follow Jill Dolan’s notion that ‘texts can be queered, turning a word that was
conventionally used as a noun – a state of being – into an active verb describing a practice
through which spectators, critics, and artists can reread any representation from a queer
perspective’.14
14 Jill Dolan, Theatre & Sexuality (Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 17.
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The first section of this dissertation will look at both burlesque and neo-burlesque
performances and how they queer constructed (social) gender, essentialist (biological) sex and
constructed sexuality / sexual preference, acknowledging the influence of the suffragette
movement, second wave feminism, and the lesbian and gay movement in the United States on
the performances, while not necessarily delving into significant details of the movements. The
second section will investigate neo-burlesque performances, which while espousing the causes of
the burlesque performances, further the debate to contemporary discussions of the ideal,
normative Body, as well as bodies on stage and in society within the gendered framework in
which they currently exist. While classical burlesque was restrictive about the kind of female
bodies it preferred on stage, whatever the flavor of the time may be, even if it was more relaxed
than contemporaneous theatre bodies, neo-burlesque aims at welcoming bodies of all genders,
sizes, and ages on stage. Such a setup allows for the existence and examination of intersectional
identities beyond what Munoz describes as “monocausal paradigms” with “normativizing
protocols”. During the discussion of bodies, I will use such adjectives and descriptors as obese,
old, disabled et al. These are meant to convey the physical attributes of bodies as we define them
culturally but without any of the negative connotations that may come with these terms. All such
terms are used purely for descriptive purposes without any qualitative judgment on my part
unless specifically discussed in the text.
Before I move on to a more detailed discussion of these topics, all of which relate to the
tease aspect of “humor and tease in burlesque” (by focusing on physical bodies and their cultural
outputs), it is critical to acknowledge the role humor plays in achieving the inclusionary goals of
burlesque.
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HUMOR ME!
Comedy does not exist independent of rage… rage is sustained and it is pitched as a call to
activism, a bid to take space in the social that has been colonized by the logics of white
normativity and heteronormativity.15
If burlesque is going to establish itself in the midst of conversation on controversial social
issues that, along with the focus of a larger political debate, tend to be highly personal and
immediate, and invite the very people it is critiquing/satirizing, it can either take on a
confrontational, ideologically charged approach, or it can temper the perceived threat to status
quo in that space into a more palatable, and consequently, potentially productive conversation.
By attempting to upset the existing social setup on a smaller scale, premising shows on ubiquity
of the non-normative crowd and their needs and desires without restricting its contributors and
patrons from exclusively that pool of people, burlesque needs to provide a safe space for the
heteronormative audience present in minority to bring about a sense of comfort. While this
attempt to also serve the heteronormative can easily be misread as privileging them, the intention
here is to undertake a non-confrontational approach, to be all-inclusive, and provide an
environment that is congenial to people of all identities. In this, it is unlike the lesbian and gay
movement of the 1970s United States where exclusively queer spaces were set up, most visibly
the gay bars and clubs, which only catered to their needs. Burlesque attempts to take this to the
next logical step where instead of a fragmented society, with each faction vying for its own
rights, it seeks to be able to promote a comprehensive, inclusive model, potentially replicable in
15 Muñoz, p. xii.
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society at large. It provides the tools to its community of a scalable ideal to be implemented on a
wider scale. Humor, crucially, while being a vehicle of criticism and subversion, is also the
ingredient of temperance in such in-your-face performances. It follows Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea
of relational aesthetics in which artists create social relations rather than material objects.16
Humor, or comedy, is a ‘site of rebellion and taboo, where the avant-garde could signal
their opposition to society’s structure’,17 writes Matthew Daube in his essay The Stand-up as
Stand-in. While humor in burlesque serves to rebel and poke the taboos with a stick, it primarily
creates [a] community, however temporary, but that community does not
inevitably exist prior to the event that creates the laughter. The fluidity, even the
loss, of community marks the connection of humor to a more radical sense of how
community itself is a temporal process and not a stable entity.18
The foundation of such communities, Nicholas Ridout writes, is ‘grounded in specific and
contemporary experiences of performance, often those in which social identities and
subjectivities marginalized or excluded in a society in which power, rights, and resources are
unevenly distributed according to gender, race, and sexuality.’ 19 This establishment of a
community, regardless of, or oblivious to, the fractured existence outside the performance helps
ease the erstwhile normal, now marginal audience members into this altered social setup as a first
step towards the creation of a new normal. From show-to-show, performance-to-performance,
audiences are introduced to a different set of identities on stage and in the stands, all part of a
different community disbanding at the end of the evening, all promoting the concept that each 16 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Wood (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002), p. 1. 17 Matthew Daube, “The Stand-up as Stand-in” in The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences, ed. by Judy Batalion (Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2012), 57-81 (p. 64). 18 Alice Rayner, “Creating the Audience: It’s All in the Timing” in The Laughing Stalk, ed. by Batalion, 28-39 (p. 34). 19 Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), pp. 5-6.
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community are equally valid and equally unstable. This sense of community is further
reinforced, unlike in traditional theatre, by the absence of the fourth wall where the performers
sit among the audiences and frequently interact with them, both on stage, and in the seats. By
breaking down the performer-audience divide, and getting rid of the intrinsic power play, the live
and informal nature of the ‘movement echoes the passage of the personal into the public… the
crowd is cast in the role of shameless voyeur, openly spying on the willing exhibitionists, and the
resultant intimacy is two-sided’.20
This is best demonstrated in an avant-garde neo-burlesque show titled Sleaze that I
attended with my friend Kaitlyn and her partner Tom. The show was hosted at the Lockside
Lounge in Camden Town, a location apropos for such a show, given that Camden Town served
as the home of underground Goth and punk subcultures in London in the latter half of the
twentieth century. Kaitlyn is a burlesque performer and academic, and before the show began,
she pointed out to Tom and I that we would be easily identifiable in that crowd as the outsiders
to the burlesque world, both of us dressed more formally for a traditional show, and without any
visibly eccentric markers a la tattoos, hairstyles, accessories etc. to denote our rebellion. Tom
was seated in a rather inaccessible location, but I was right in the path leading from the bar to the
stage, and sure enough, with the first performance, a go-go boylesque performed by (Pretty)
Miss Cairo,21 I was ‘victimized’ by her (I use the feminine pronoun because even though she
performed a boylesque routine, she identifies as a drag queen, and her official biography uses the
same pronoun22) stripping routine, followed by her grabbing my face and shoving it between her
bare butt cheeks with a clear view of her male genitalia from between her legs. Neither the
nudity nor the physical interaction was meant as a precursor to any sexual activity but performed
20 Daube, pp. 76-77. 21 Miss Cairo, Sleaze, Lockside Lounge, London, 5 March 2015. 22 Anon., ‘Miss Cairo’, < http://www.prettymisscairo.com/#!biography/cjg9> [Accessed 21 August 2015].
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in jest to loud cheering as an ice-breaker, and as a form of connecting with the audiences,
specifically those that were obvious outsiders. After her performance, Miss Cairo came and sat
next to me, shared a drink and enjoyed other acts as a fellow audience member, thus first
including me in her world, then becoming a part of mine, validating both and alienating none.
Daube speaks of stand-up comics as a stand-in for the audience on stage, an alter ego in
the spotlight, speaking on behalf of everyone. Burlesque performers can easily be seen in the
same role as a stand-up comic, with the added activity of stripping, or a variation thereof. As a
stand-in, the performer is not laughing at the audiences, but laughing for the community as a
whole, as Miss Cairo did. By developing that rapport to let the audiences allow the performer to
speak for them, the performer eliminates the distance that separates the viewer from the artist,
and without the alienation, there is identification. This sense of identification is critical because
with identification, there can be no othering, and without the self-other dichotomy, there is no
normal-abnormal divide, no normativity and only a coherent identity of community.
The challenge here, for the performer, is to be able to establish that rapport. It is
challenging because of what Rebecca Krefting calls the lack of identification with marginalized
positions in comedy due to a lack of common referents.23 In burlesque performances, performers
provide the illusion of catering to expectations but introduce complexity in the performance by
specifically targeting the points of disconnectedness between the performer and the audience,
and tailoring their jokes or physical comedy to highlight the discord that exists. The focus on that
cultural chasm becomes the common referent in this case, and the meeting place for the two
sides, albeit arriving from different directions. This identification, eradication of othering and
fostering a community helps alleviate the fear of the unknown, speaking of the Indian, the
23 Rebecca Krefting, “Laughter in the Final Instance: The Cultural Economy of Humor (Or why women aren’t perceived to be as funny as men)” in The Laughing Stalk, ed. by Batalion, 140-156 (p. 149).
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French and the Swede, the fear that marks the difference between tolerance and acceptance. To
that extent,
comedic disidentification accomplishes important cultural critique while at the
same time providing cover form, and enabling the avoidance itself, of scenarios of
direct confrontation with phobic and reactionary ideologies.24
24 Muñoz, 119.
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DRAG SEX INTO GENDER: QUEER, ISN’T IT?
The performing arts provide the most direct, most graphic, often most compelling
representations of gender; however, their form and function are often at odds with the concerns
of everyday life or even with the common sanctions of society.25
That burlesque has defied those very common sanctions of society has been at the very
heart of it being relegated to the fringes of the art world. When Lydia Thompson and Pauline
Markham of the British Blondes took the stage in 1868’s New York, they (i) re-appropriated a
space so far reserved for men (ii) parodied classical plays written, produced and acted in by men
(iii) parodied the tradition of men dressing up as women by reversing it (iv) dressed
provocatively for the era, in leggings, showing their curves to men in the audience (v) took
charge of the creative production of the show (vi) became entrepreneurs who earned money,
primarily a masculine preoccupation at the time. Until that point, as in traditional theatre
described below, so in any performance on stage and in society,
women’s subjectivity… was in fact absent from the theatre, except as it was
configured as the other by male imaginations; some critics went so far as to
declare the traditional theatre was wholly a male preserve for the appropriation
and exclusion of women. Only the women re-invented by a male-dominated
system could be reflected in this looking-glass.26
Thompson and her troupe created and provided a different reflection of female
subjectivity to audiences than was available to audiences from traditional representation
25 Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 6. 26 Senelick, p. 6.
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in the arts. They used, challenged and appropriated existing norms to their benefit,
thrilling and scandalizing audiences, without alienating them. Stories abound, of which
Allen and Zemeckis relate a few, of the perpetrators of moral policing who would
consistently and conspicuously show up only to see the most provocative of acts in the
name of monitoring content. Even those they offended, the British Blondes allured. This
paved the way for a two-sided disidentification.
As the title of this paper suggests, I argue that burlesque performances can be
seen as attempts at disidentification with the heteronormative world I have described
earlier. I use Muñoz’s idea of disidentification, as a strategy that
neither opts to assimilate within a structure not strictly oppose it; rather
disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology.
Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification,
assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere
(counteridentification, utopianism), this “working on and against” is a strategy
that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact
permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of
local or everyday struggles of resistance.27
Instead of setting itself up as an oppositional model for a different construction of self-identity,
burlesque follows a Foucauldian model where social relationality, ‘through ceaseless struggles
and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses’28 existing power structures. As Foucault
claims, ‘there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition’ 29 between contradicting
27 Muñoz, pp. 11-12. 28 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 92. 29 Foucault, p. 94.
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configurations since a strictly opposing framework simply becomes a reflection of the existing
structure, in turn creating what it sought to oppose. The lesbian and gay movement ended up in
such a situation when the fight for its validation ended up excluding the queers of their world, the
bisexual and transgendered population, from their community. It created a substructure of the
very same culture it had battled against. To disidentify,
we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse
and excluded discourse, or between a dominated discourse and the dominated
one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various
strategies.30
The counternarrative that burlesque provides to the dominant discourse of a reductive binary
subjectivity derives from its inclusion of various performance genres and a celebration of the
dominant ideology along with marginalized ones, avoiding an adversarial position. In this
section, I look at Dita Von Teese’s signature performance, the Martini Glass striptease, a detailed
look at gender conformity and performativity in Emily B’s act and gender deconstructionism in
drag performances. I analyze them in this sequence as I see these performances in an order of
increasing subversion, providing insight into the layered complexity built in within gendered
identities.
Dita Von Teese’s stage persona and performances, in her own words, are a homage to the
golden period of American burlesque of the 1930s. Other than the commercial success that she
has been able to garner, both she and her performances espouse the ideals of the burlesque
queens like Gypsy Rose Lee and Ann Corio, who ruled the roost in their time, which include all
the modes of subversion from Thompson’s time which I enumerated at the beginning of this
section. Another aspect of burlesque performers that aids subversion of norms is the assumption 30 Foucault, p. 100.
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of a stage name. By using either their real names (a la Lydia Thompson, Pauline Markham and a
few others in the initial stages) or larger-than-life stage names for commercial effect as well as to
protect their identities, these women carved an individual identity for themselves, making
themselves visible, constituting an image of self that they controlled in a society that relegated
them to domestic duties. Dita Von Teese follows in the same tradition, fashioning her name after
the silent-era actress Dita Parlo, with Von Treese picked out of a phonebook at random, but
accidentally misspelled to Von Teese,31 which appropriately became a play on the word tease.
With von being the German word for “from”, her stage names ends up describing her as “Dita
from the world of tease,” an appropriate name for someone who wants to project herself as
deeply entrenched in the historical tradition of burlesque. This foregrounding of individuality
through naming of self, from the very beginning of the burlesque tradition, created women with
persona on stage, each with a different character and unique traits that identified her as a subject,
and not simply a passive object to be looked at and sexualized. By taking the stage and curating
their own performances, women also gained agency where they could design their own
narratives and either challenge the existing power relationships or proffer an alternate one. All of
this can be seen to help undermine the existing gendered roles in society and offer the possibility
of bringing about a change. Muñoz describes this as a process ‘in which the artist reformulates
the actual performativity… making [the performances] rich antinormative treasure troves of
queer possibility’.32 Contemporary performers continue to follow in the same tradition.
All major burlesque stars of the 20th century have had a signature act that adds to their
distinctiveness. Carrie Finnell’s tassel twirling, Sally Rand’s fan dance, Blaze Starr and Rosita
Royce’s dances with panthers and doves, respectively, or most famously, Gypsy Rosee Lee’s
31 Katherine Nguyen, “Dita Von Teese: Call her old-fashioned” in The Orange County Register < http://www.ocregister.com/articles/von-143092-teese-burlesque.html> [Accessed 25 August 2015]. 32 Muñoz, p. x.
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recital of poetry or literary prose as she shed articles of clothing, all gave a distinct flavor to their
performances and had a loyal fan base who came back for repeat performances. This allowed
burlesque to offer a multiplicity of identities with discrete experiences fracturing the coherent
narrative of an ideal bourgeois woman. Jill Dolan speaks of the power such acts can wield, where
solo performance’s monologue structure offers room to address difficult social
truths and allow LGBTQ people to explore their similarities to one another, as
well as their differences. The form enables the performer to testify to his or her
personal experience and asks spectators to witness the performer’s life publicly.33
Von Teese recreates some of these old performances, like Rand’s fan dance, but also creates new
ones in the same vein. She famously straddles a carousel horse in one of her acts, and her
signature act is her Giant Martini Glass striptease act.34 In this performance, she strips out of her
bejeweled dress and climbs into the giant glass filled, presumably, with Martini; gets her glass
sandals taken off by an assistant, stirs the drink with her body bent at the waist, not unlike the
hands of a clock moving clockwise and anticlockwise on her whim; and uses a green olive
sponge to drench herself with the liquid inside the glass. Her performance, as far as
contemporaneous burlesque traditions go, is fairly normative and tailored towards a more
commercial objective rather than an ideological one. Despite that, it offers some rich imagery
and potential for subversion through referencing various literary and popular traditions. First of
all, she makes use of martini, a man’s drink, epitomized by James Bond’s ‘shaken not stirred’
catchphrase and appropriates it for a highly feminized performance, and she stirs it with her
body, not shake it. Her glass sandals are reminiscent of Cinderella’s but instead of a prince
putting them on, a male assistant comes to take them off. Her identity as a performer, a stripper,
33 Dolan, p. 43. 34 Dita Von Teese, <https://youtu.be/YBFDqrXxTaw> [Accessed 20 August 2015].
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is rooted in the sandals being taken off, unlike Cinderella, whose true identity as a princess
hinged on the sandals fitting her. Taking an alcoholic sponge bath is a comment on the
ubiquitous female carwash fantasies depicted in film, television and pornographic industries in
the United States, for example, Carmen Electra, who does it with milk.35
Von Teese makes visible the gendered role of sexualized objectification that women are
subjected to in society, heightens it and re-presents it to a willing audience for money and fame. I
had a conversation with a friend a few years after the Paris Hilton sex tape had come out and
how she had been unable to relinquish the public image that the video created of her. My friend
offered an alternate point of view, arguing that if society was going to categorize her as a slut
regardless, perhaps this is her way of saying, “You want me to be a slut. I’ll be the best damn
slut you’ve ever been.” The merits of this conversation are questionable on two fronts: is Hilton
is considered a slut in popular perception; and is there any conscious attempt on her part to
maintain an (derogatory) image of herself? Regardless of the validity of Hilton’s social standing,
the conversation raises an important point about disidentification that one way of subverting the
system is to manipulate it from within. Von Teese’s performances fall in that cateogry. She pays
homage to an earlier era and an art form, and that itself has a place in the oeuvre of burlesque,
but there is also a political impact, intended or not, of her use of the system. This was perhaps
truer during the early twentieth century when ‘overt sexuality was the badge of not only the
prostitute; it could taint the New Woman as well. It constituted the dark side of her new-found
liberation, which could be construed as subversion of masculine prerogatives’.36 Ridout writes
that the process of constituting an audience by putting together an act for them and performing it
might itself be political ‘as long as it is praxis (a processual action) rather than poesis (the
35 Carmen Electra, <https://youtu.be/iMnsBuAu9B8> [Accessed 27 August 2015]. 36 Senelick, p. 315.
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making of something)’.37 The classical tradition of burlesque, and Von Teese, may very well be
seen in that light. Von Teese offers no political content in her performances, but by situating
herself within a tradition laced with political overtones, and appropriating a system designed to
oppress to her benefit, she inadvertently challenges the power hierarchies, and by acquiring
commercial success, paves the way for more disruptive performances in the genre.
Emily B’s performance at Sleaze38 couldn’t be farther from Dita Von Teese’s brand of
burlesque. There was no fancy performance venue, no seductive music, no stripping involved.
Emily was dressed in a loose fitting printed floral dress, her hair tied in two pigtails, a rather
conservative look compared to most performers in burlesque. She was engaged in two
simultaneous conversations on stage, one virtual text-message based conversation, played out on
a screen, imitating a Tinder (the currently highly popular phone-based social medium for online
dating) conversation; the other non-verbal conversation with the audiences, reacting to her
virtual conversation and pretending to ask for suggestions or validation. In her act, she is early
for her first Tinder date, waiting alone at a bar, apprehensive about her first experience with
online dating, and in her nervousness, starts messaging her date asking when that person is going
to arrive, and if she should order two drinks while she waits. The conversation that ensues from
the other end mimics what has become a running joke in social media about desperate men
making lewd, lurid comments, describing crudely how horny they are and explicitly describing
the kinds of sexual acts they would like to engage in while asking for naked pictures of the girl.
As Emily keeps receiving each message, she looks to the audience with consternation, unsure of
how to respond. At one point, when the prospective date asks for a picture of her, she starts
37 Ridout, p. 17. 38 Emily B, Sleaze, Lockside Lounge, London, 5 March 2015.
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fiddling and staring under her dress, feeling her breasts, clearly uncomfortable with the exchange
and uncertain how far to indulge that person, in the end, leaves before her date arrives.
While she is burlesquing contemporary popular culture and technology-mediated
relationships, along with a critique of the sexist attitude in society towards women, what stands
out is the initial assumption on my part, and presumably several audience members, that the
person on the other end is a male.. The assumption that her act is part of a heterosexual
interaction, even though this mediated conversation provides no clues to any aspect of the
identity of her date is a brilliant example of Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. In
Gender Trouble, when Butler writes that the process of repetition is ‘at once a reenactment and
re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and
ritualized form of legitimization’,39 in this act when we play our part of an engaged audience, by
assigning a gender to a series of text messages, we are all performing the gender we assign
reenacted and re-experienced through language. We attribute the usage of certain kind of
language and specific actions as gendered traits, and allow those preconceived notions to
determine how we react to the situation. Had I initially not presumed the instigator of sexually-
charged conversation as a man, perhaps my reaction would have been “Good for her – she’s a
woman who is sexually confident and knows what she wants” as opposed to “All men are dogs.”
Dolan writes that
We often take for granted that what we see is heterosexuality. If we assume
instead that not all sexual preferences or identities are ‘normative’ – that is,
heterosexual, which is considered the norm – where do we look for alternative
39 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 38.
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sexualities such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgender, or queer,
unless they are part of a play’s content or are clearly assigned to a character?40
Traditional theatre has been a problem in this respect, where at a certain stage, ‘gay men and
lesbians found community backstage, theatre often perpetuated conservative, normalizing values
in front of the footlights, forcing queer artists to remain closeted’.41 Emily’s act raises the same
question and provides an answer. Where Dita Von Teese’s act can be seen as pandering to the
heteronormative, Emily B’s performance is more ambivalent without any definitive signs.
Burlesque here provides an opportunity for audiences to engage in a discussion of sexual
identities and preferences, and question our internalized assumptions about what constitutes
gender. How did I, without being definitively communicated, derive that a heterosexual man at
the other end instigated the exchange? Because burlesque is a space where the counternormative
are equally privileged, being there allowed me to question myself and allow for the possibility of
a different answer, and that is the success of the form, of bringing change from within by
questioning the internal logic of existing structures.
The Fabulous Russella’ drag performance 42 further provides avenues to look for
alternative sexual identities that Dolan brings up, where spectators go in expecting something
different on offer. A fair amount has been written about drag and its gender bending and gender
blending possibilities. Laurence Senelick sums up the most common arguments provided
towards drag’s contributions to what both he and Butler call gender illusionism.
If essence of gender can be simulated through wigs, props, gestures, costumes,
cross-dressing implies that it is not an essence at all, but an unstable construct.
Gender assignment which at first looks to be deeply rooted in biological
40 Dolan, p. 2. 41 Dolan, p. 7. 42 The Fabulous Russella, Sleaze, Lockside Lounge, London, 5 March 2015.
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imperatives and social exigencies turns out to be no more essential than table
manners. Therefore, most taboos against cross-dressing, except when they are
rooted in religious belief, are related less to ‘elemental’ or ‘fundamental’ concepts
of gender than to codes of conduct and social status.43
Russella’s act does not provide anything particularly new but it warrants some attention
nonetheless as it does engender the spirit of what drag stands for. For her performance, Russella
was dressed in a red and white frock with a corseted waist and a blonde wig. In addition to
involving the audiences, her act truly brought to fore the ‘hidden’ aspects of a staged
performance, the people backstage as well as a box full of props that she kept with herself on
stage and put it to use as necessary. Technical difficulties, a misplaced prop, a wardrobe
malfunction, instead of being performance faux pas, became part of the act and a cause for
humor. To that extent, she defined her performance like her gender, a work in progress,
indeterminate and evolving, subject to change. She came prepared with a CD of 11 songs, which
were played at random based on the vote of the audiences. She then picked out a different
hairpiece or a mask for each one, the most memorable being a very realistic looking mask of the
head of a horse, neck onwards, that completely covered her face and projected outwards, making
the act very outlandish as her voice echoed from inside the mask.
If Russella answers Dolan’s call for a space where the LGBTQ representations are easy
to spot, she also confuses it because while we might assign the character to the queer category on
account of her cross-dressing and her behavior, we cannot predict if the performer himself is not
a straight white man, thus destabilizing the notion of fixed identities, even if they are not polar
opposites like the man/woman binary. This creates an uncanny sensation in Freudian terms,
something that is both familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously, and thus Senelick’s claim that ‘the 43 Senelick, p. 3.
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animosities directed at cross-dressing, homosexual practices and the performing arts are part of
an ideological tangle, in which the various strands of fear and prejudice are hopelessly knotted
together’.44 Muñoz offers us a way out of this, describing that ‘the phobic object, through a
campy over-the-top performance is reconfigured as sexy and glamorous, and not as the pathetic
and abject spectacle that is appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture’.45
Drag itself, including Russella’s performance, is a hyperbolic representation of the
normative female anatomy, of gendered clothing and the culturally established rigors of beauty.
Every time Russella took off her wig and put on a new one, she went through gender
transformation in front of the audience, highlighting external characteristics such as long hair and
dresses as being socially defined and popularly accepted symbols of gendered traits. It does not
mock females or femininity, but the narrow definitions of both that tend to exclude a large part of
the population from what is considered acceptable. ‘A drag queen uses the iconography of a
diva, using strategies of self-creation and self-defense to transfigure an identificatory site not
meant to accommodate male identity.’46 A performer would create her own understanding of
what it means to be female, an expression of self or a rebellion against an invalidated self, but the
costume and stage also provide a shield against any confrontational responses. Within Charles
Saunders Peirce’s tripartite semiotic structure of icons, indices and symbols, drag is an attempt to
move gendered existence from an icon or an index to a symbol. Senelick applies Butler’s concept
of performativity to drag, writing that ‘gender is no longer a disguise that has to be stripped
away, but a congeries of actions, statements, appearances, constantly in flux. Transvestism is
simply an appliance to enhance the performativity… to efface any boundary between the
44 Senelick, p. 9. 45 Muñoz, p. 3. 46 Muñoz, p. 31.
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performative and the lived’.47 A figure in a dress is no longer the icon of a biological woman. A
stiletto or a skirt is no longer an index for one half of the gender binary. All that leaves us with is
gender as a symbol, a socially agreed and recognizable set of actions and attributes that
constitute what we choose to call male or female, debunking the essentialist approach to gender.
Thus, ‘the drag queen is disidentifying… with not only the ideal of woman but the a priori
relationship of woman and femininity that is a tenant of gender-normative thinking’.48
When Russella puts on the horse’s head, she complicates the issue even further. Consider
Senelick’s argument below:
Displaying the body to the gaze of others automatically implies the availability of
that body for sexual exploitation. Merely by coming on stage, an actor of any
gender becomes a site for erotic speculation and imagination. The act of cross-
dressing is the paradigm for acting since it directs the attention to the enigma of
the actor’s body and leaves the spectator with troubling memories, unanswered
questions.49
With a cross dressing performer, not only gender, but the derivative binary sexual identification
of heterosexual/homosexual subjects also gets blurred. Does one imagine oneself with the
character or the performer behind the make-up? How does that inter-relationality play out in such
a scenario? With the horse’s head on, Russella throws in bestiality into the mix. The whole scene
becomes outrageous, grotesque and fragmented. As audiences, when we clearly see it as an act,
we begin to question whether Russella identifies as a man, a woman or a transgendered person.
We also cannot determine where her sexual preferences lie, which like Emily’s performance,
allow us to go beyond our heteronormative expectations to the existence of more fluid selves.
47 Senelick, p. 5. 48 Muñoz, p. 108. 49 Senelick, p. 8.
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Homi Bhabha writes of a postcolonial subject’s relation to its erstwhile colonial masters,
‘mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal.
Mimicry is thus the sign of the double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and
discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the other as it visualizes power.50 This is equally applicable to
mimicry in gender, as drag does, and becomes a disidentifying force that appropriates – it neither
conforms, nor contradicts. Drag is as much a celebration of femininity as it is a critique of the
rigid structures within which it is constrained; ‘rather than confounding categories it invents new
ones, providing fresh matter for desire, and releases the spectator’s imagination and libido by an
ever-changing kaleidoscope of gender’.51 Vito Acconci, in his 1971 performance, Conversions,52
while not under the purview of burlesque, interrogates the more essentialist rigidity of gender
binarism by attempting to convert his male body into a female body by tucking in his genitals
between his legs and walking around as if with a vagina, a technique imitated by Miss Cairo in
her performance. He also uses the heat from a candle to mold his chest into breasts. This can
possibly be seen as drag in the extreme, though without the same context. Yet he started the
conversation on gender transformation before gender reassignment surgeries were significantly
more difficult, rare and stigmatized than they are today. While drag addresses the cultural aspects
of gender, Acconci brought to fore the possibility of lack of essentialism in bodies, witnessed
naturally in some cases, and medically achieved in others.
At a certain point, drag queens got assimilated into popular culture, most recently with
the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which Senelick appropriately calls their disneyfication. While
the performers themselves continue to design performances that offer a critique of the gendered
roles, it doesn’t seem to be as subversive in its effects anymore.
50 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 86. 51 Senelick, p. 12. 52 Vito Acconci, Conversions II, New York, 1971 <https://youtu.be/LONU90o4Bzw> [Accessed 27 August 2015].
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The drag queen has become so assimilated that such acts are now drawn largely
for mainstream heterosexual audiences. Whether or not they really get it is beside
the point: they flock to these performances as they once poured into sideshow
tents. Most current drag is no more subversive than the black-face of minstrelsy,
which accounts for its popularity.53
This was marked, perhaps coincidentally, potentially as a response to it, by the rise of drag kings
towards the end of the twentieth century, women impersonating men. This provided an
interesting alternative in the context of burlesque because their ‘gender illusions flow from a less
socially powerful position (‘women’) to a more condoned and empowered one (the privileges
that accrue around ‘men’), the performers enjoy talking about their work as social activism and
teasing out its political implications’.54 Yet it is also fraught with the risk of being received by
the audiences as the ‘weaker sex’ aspiring to the status of its superior counterpart, and in turn
reinforcing the existing tiered dichotomy. The assumption of elements of the opposite gender’s
traits can be a deconstructing act but the incapability to fully transform may also be seen as an
insufficiency of the female gender. It still serves two important purposes. The first being that it
allows audiences to see that gender flows both ways. If drag queens mimic feminine traits, drag
kings can as easily manipulate conventions to imitate masculine attributes. The second is that it
further puts in flux the hegemony of the masculinist society, one that Thompson started with
providing agency to women, and that drag kings call into question by not just taking over roles
reserved for men, but also their identities.
53 Senelick, p. 501. 54 Dolan, p. 47.
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SHOW ME(:) THE MONEY(?)
By controlling her own spectacle as sexualized, feminized and ‘low’, and as an immigrant or
foreign ‘other’, the burlesque performer powerfully makes transparent deeper power
imbalances, instabilities and anxieties at play in society at large.55
The subversive power of burlesque came from the fact that it was controlled, creatively
and commercially, by the marginalized. Lydia Thompson performed her own shows, managed
her scheduling and controlled her finances, but as the popularity of burlesque increased, it
became an attractive commercial investment for men looking to make quick money. In the late-
nineteenth century, several producers came about who were selecting the venues or even running
them, defining the kind of girls they wanted on stage (the Ziegfeld girls and the Minsky dancers,
for example) and taking away the agency that they had fought for. During the Great Depression,
the bigger stars were still able to command independence but their world had been infiltrated and
financial considerations played a significant role in what was performed. As Burlesque died a
slow death in the 1950s with the advent of Playboy, and penetration of bikinis and pornography
in day-to-day life along with the easy access to television and cinema, it left behind only its most
commercial aspects – pretty girls stripping on stage. The go-go clubs with caged dancing girls
became popular, and were the forerunners to the modern-day strip clubs.56
When burlesque made a comeback in the 1990s, it came to us in two forms, one that I
have described as neo-burlesque which came with all the subversive potential of yore and more,
the other that called itself traditional burlesque and claims to pay homage to the burlesque 55 Willson, p. 38. 56 Baldwin, p. 13.
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queens of the past. Of the second kind, a majority of it is nothing more than depoliticized,
commodified product being fed to audiences for commercial purposes. The highly popular
burlesque acts that have pervaded popular culture, whether it is Cameron Diaz performing Dita
von Teese’s martini glass act in the movie version of Charlie’s Angels57 or Christina Aguilera
and Cher starring in a Steve Antin film titled Burlesque.58 They are all indication of the extent to
which its political potential has been co-opted for profiteering by the businesses.
I argued in the previous section that Von Teese’s performances, while being highly
normative, still serve the interests of the burlesque ideology by making it more mainstream, more
accessible to people and helping diminish the stigma associated with it, a popular perception
promoted by films like Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!59 that burlesque and cabaret venues
served as a front for prostitution. While it was definitely true to an extent in the early 20th
century, any contemporary beliefs to that end are utterly unfounded. I carried this perception
until I started working on this project and have encountered several people along the way who
felt the same way. Even though I read into Von Teese’s performances as being overall helpful to
the cause, Jacki Willson finds it harder to swallow. She writes that von Teese’s performances are
not informed by politicized debates, and she herself remains unfeminist and individualist, which
can potentially create problems for the young girls who look up to and aspire to follow in her
footsteps. She writes:
when performers like Von Teese fit so perfectly into sexually “submissive”
stereotypes of the “ideal” woman, how can there be room for subversion? Her
imagery and persona skate on thin ice between consolidating mainstream values
57 Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, dir. by Joseph McGinty Nichol (Sony Pictures, 2003). 58 Burlesque, dir. by Steve Antin (De Line Pictures, 2010). 59 Moulin Rouge!, dir. by Baz Luhrmann (Twentieth Century Fox and Bazmark Films, 2001).
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and creating new sensual erotic models… Von Teese’s imagery seems too close
to the present representational system – it is purely pastiche rather than parody.60
She contrasts this to more politicized performances where the burlesque performers
use a controlled manipulation of how they are represented by way of sexual
“feminine” stereotypes… This desire to be desired, this insistence that they can be
desired, both disruptively and disobediently plays up to narrowly defined “ideals”
and parodies “fuckability”. It is an act of derision as well as an act of self-pride.61
This is a tightrope walk that is extremely difficult to balance. I disagree with Willson’s
evaluation of Von Teese specifically. While I already established in my analysis earlier that Von
Teese is using the existing representational system, I argue that she is exploiting it to her
advantage and that of the genre’s, and that in itself is an act of subversion. Willson’s argument is
not without merit, though. There are a plethora of burlesque shows that pander to the idea of
burlesque as glorified striptease, even promote it for financial gains, without any ideological
underpinnings, or even creative content. The shows I attended at the London Burlesque Festival
were churning out performance after performance of young, twenty-something, white nubile
women disrobing on stage to various degrees of undress. Any sense of variety was brought in
through ridiculously elaborate costumes mimicking the African, oriental or indigenous traditions
– peacock feathers and snake dances – to evoke a sense of the exotic. Entire shows went about in
that fashion. It might as well be Pamela Anderson on stage. These performances are closer to
Willson’s critique of Von Teese because some of them took away any agency from the artists
that I discussed earlier. The performers are not named, there is nothing distinctive about their
acts, and while I do not know how much autonomy they had, the whole set up appeared to be
60 Willson, p. 179. 61 Willson, p. 177.
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driven by a commercial edict that defined the parameters within which the shows must be
curated. Even boylesque performances played up the conventional characters of the Playboy or
the Cowboy stripping to reveal six-pack abs. The boylesque performances were only subversive
to the extent that they provide an avenue for women to enjoy some eye candy, in an
entertainment industry that is horribly skewed in the favor of men. Since these were performed
as part of the festival, the performances becomes highly institutionalized, money needs to be
made, sponsors need to satisfied, an coherent image needs to maintained, expectations need to be
catered to, thus handpicking artists and designing shows, which in turn ends up making them a
commercial spectacle, a more respectable space for watching a striptease than a strip club, since
it’s performed under the aegis of an arts festival.
The epitome of the commercialization of the underground is perhaps the cabaret venue
Moulin Rouge in Montmartre in Paris. It has taken on such a touristic avatar that people do not
even know the name of the show they watch, or they believe they watched “The Moulin Rouge”.
I attended Féerie62, unfortunately (for me) on Valentine’s Day. The fourth wall is strictly back
up, there are no illusions of any alternate lifestyles, and shows are combined with meals, or in the
case of Valentine’s Day, love package deals for couples, complete with dinner, champagne and
the show to the tune of 250 euros for the evening. This is a far cry from the days of Toulouse-
Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, when Oscar Wilde practically lived there in the late-nineteenth century,
Moulin Rouge embodying the essence and the spirit of the avant-garde artists and artistry of
Montmartre.
Such a spirit has also emerged in smaller venues and shows, for example, Straight Up by
House of Burlesque, part burlesque and part cabaret, at London’s South Bank summer venue, the
62 Thierry Outrilla, Féerie, Moulin Rouge, Paris, 14 February 2015.
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Spiegeltent. Ella Boo’s performance, using a vodka-themed glass instead of a martini,63 was
simply an imitation of Von Teese’s act without any creative rewriting of the act or the message
therein. During one of the performances in the show, one of the audience members was dancing
where he was seated, without being disruptive to others but a member of the security team
walked up to him to ask to maintain discipline during the performance and not ruin the decorum
of the house. This will not happen at a neo-burlesque performance where audiences are
encouraged to enjoy and participate. There has been a rise of these contemporary shows which
are closer to traditional theatre in their approach, and while claiming to pay homage to history,
have simply ended up being spectacles for commercial consumption.
This is where the first kind of burlesque to emerge in the post-1990 resurgence, the avant-
garde neo-burlesque distinguishes itself from the commodified spectacle that Willson takes
exception to. Neo-burlesque continues to operate in the subversive mode, encouraging
performance of subjectivities both within and without the two domains of commercial
pragmatism and a community of utopian fantasies.Neo-burlesque’s ‘sexualized imagery is
neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. The system both empowers and exploits’.64 This
disidentification is further explored through the body of the performer in the next section.
63 Ella Boo, House of Burlesque: Straight Up, London Wonderground, London, 11 June 2015. 64 Willson, p. 174.
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MY BODY, EVERY(-)BODY!
The body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical
possibilities, a complicated process of appropriation which any phenomenological theory of
constitution needs to describe.65
Simon Shepherd argues that theatre, and staged performance at large, ‘is a practice
in which societies negotiate around what the body is and means’.66 This negotiation in
popular modes of representation, whether live or recorded, as I have argued in this paper,
has revolved around either an active exclusion, or at the very least, a focused inclusion of
normative identities. In traditional theatre and plays, this distinction is most evident in the
unwritten rules, as well as our expectations, of who is eligible to play the lead/title roles
and which performers are ‘suitable’ for character/supporting roles. There are obvious
exceptions – Judy Dench and Morgan Freeman come to mind – but they are primarily just
that: exceptions. Colette Conroy expounds on Sarah Bernhardt’s differentiation of the ideal
body from bodies. An ideal body presupposes uniformity of depiction through similar
physical attributes and an equivalence of lived experience. While Bernhardt or Conroy
don’t equate the ideal body with the normative body, I would like to argue that normativity
is the path to idealization, and an ideal body is bound to be a derivative of a normative
understanding of the body. Bodies, on the other hand, are disparate, individual, without
majoritarian coherence or an overarching experiential narrative.
65 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, 1988, ed. by Katie Conboy, Nada Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 401-417 (p. 403). 66 Simon Shepherd, Theatre, Body and Pleasure (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 1.
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Neo-‐burlesque, as I wrote in my introduction, while espousing all the subversive
potential that traditional burlesque performances have paved the way for, engages with the
critical discourse of the Body, bringing disparate bodies on stage in plain view, and make a
case for their legitimacy as much as any other. Bodies are sites of inscription of social and
cultural mores, imbued with particular contexts, and as cultural texts, neo-‐burlesque
performances allow us ‘to read them as an act of communication, so our thoughts are not
unmotivated flashes of lone brilliance but a considered and social response to a shared
cultural text’.67 Conroy calls bodies, distractions. I contend that, at least in the current
context, non-‐normative bodies are distractions. If we encounter normative bodies aligned
with our expectations in a performance, they tend to blend in or become invisible to our
culturally trained eye. Only bodies that stand out, that question our assumptions become
distractions. They distract because our focus shifts from the act itself to the performer who
doesn’t “seem to belong”, or we are fascinated by the fact that “even she can do it”. Neo-‐
burlesque uses this to its advantage as a means to highlighting the absurdity of conventions
and acts as an equalizer of bodies within its arena. It is thus able to present to us the
‘semiotic flexibility to enable us to develop an understanding of the different sorts of
causal… connections’.68 In this section, I look at three performances, by Chrys Columbine,
Lieselle Terret, and Mat Fraser, also in the increasing order of subversion or complexity of
issues raised about bodies on stage.
I witnessed Chrys Columbine performing her signature act “Naked Nocturne which sees
her playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor whilst disrobing”69 at the CellarDoor Cabaret
67 Conroy, p. 41. 68 Conroy, p. 74. 69 Anon., ‘Chrys Columbine’, <http://chryscolumbine.com/index.php/features> [Accessed 17 August 2015].
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Bar in the Aldwych quarter of London. The performance was part of an afternoon titled Beyond
Burlesque: The Changing Face of Cabaret hosted under the Arts and Humanities Festival
organized by King’s College London with the year’s theme being Underground. 70 The
performance was aptly suited to the theme, both since burlesque tends to be culturally
underground and the venue, CellarDoor, being an erstwhile underground gents lavatory for the
London West End’s theatre goers, ‘once the reputed haunt of Wilde, Orton and Gielgud’,71
serving as a literal and metaphorical underground site – they themselves describe it as 1930s
Berlin meets New York basement dive.
Columbine’s website describes her as burlesque superstar, pianist, and a pin-up and
porcelain doll. As far as bringing novelty to burlesque acts go, she is certainly the only one on
the popular burlesque circuit to be a trained classical pianist. My research has turned up none
other that can lay claim to a similar skill. For the act, Columbine was dressed in a bustier, a
wraparound skirt, and opera gloves, all in black. As she plays the piano, the gloves come off with
slightly exaggerated movements, followed by the skirt and the bustier, and a deft removal of the
brassiere as she builds up to the crescendo, a musical orgasm, leaving her in her underwear and
black pasties amidst whistles and cheering from a couple of male audience members.
At the end of the evening, a Question & Answer session for the audience with the
performers and academics present for the event took on a heated debate about the conduct of
those men who cheered when Columbine took off her brassiere. Those who found the behavior
unacceptable spoke of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the heterosexual male gaze from her book,
Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, the gaze that within a patriarchal setup continues to
objectify female bodies as sex objects or sexed objects. The whole discussion had the effect of
70 Chrys Columbine, ‘Naked Nocturne’ in Beyond Burlesque: The Changing Face of Cabaret, performed 19 September 2014 at The Cellar Door. 71 Anon., CellarDoor, <http://www.cellardoor.biz/cellardoor.htm> [Accessed 17 August 2015].
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setting up two camps, one comprised of what one might call a traditional feminist approach
against the patriarchal power structures; the other, a more inclusive thought that emanated from
the performers themselves, show producers and venue owners – the people on the inside. They
did not see the cheering during disrobing as objectionable, but rather as a celebration of both the
performance and the body of the performer, regardless of the category that the body might be
classified under. Burlesque performances tend to be a highly expressive celebration of sexuality,
with the audiences constantly being encouraged by comperes to scream, shout, whistle and
applaud in all possible forms. In this instance, that same action became problematic because the
body being celebrated happened to be very normative – a thin, white girl in her 20s, a pin up in
the mold of the Hollywood-propaganda of ideal bodies – a body whose celebration seems to
reinforce everything that neo-burlesque seems to be fighting against. Yet, the rationale of the
performers was that every body is worth celebrating – if it happens to fall in the current societal
norms, that is not a reason to qualify it as an invalid body. We need to develop a sense of
appreciation for all kinds of bodies, whether they are in concert with our or the society’s
aesthetic sensibilities or not. As we will see further, the non-normative bodies in the other
performances were cheered equally, if not with more enthusiasm.
Robert C. Allen discusses that ‘without the performer's body, there was no burlesque’,72
but when Lydia Thompson or Gypsy Rose Lee got on the stage, that performer’s body was a
female body which was a site of inscription of bourgeois male authority that was impersonating
males on stage. The problem was that ‘burlesque produced a female body out of control and
unable to control itself… dangerous because it represented the antithesis of the rational,
72 Allen, p. 189.
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governed and governable "corpus" of the drama.’73 This highlights the problem where traditional
theatre has been ‘a way of organizing unruly, undisciplined bodies into a common goal or
culture’.74 Theatre has controlled what kind of bodies have been allowed on stage, and that has
become a means to a representational system which privileges certain kind of bodies over others,
propagating the normalizing narrative through repetition of white normative bodies as the ones
worthy of viewing. Columbine, for no fault of hers, falls within that category, and although neo-
burlesque welcomes such normative bodies, its true potential lies in highlighting what the norm
tends to hide.
Liselle Terret, a lecturer in Applied Theatre at Coventry University and a neo-burlesque
performer herself, through her performances, problematizes the ideal body because of the kind of
expectations they put on women in search for the normative body. Her stage name, Doris La
Trine, appropriately mirrors her oft-performed toilet (or latrine) act, Climb Inside (Burlesquing
Bulimia).75 Terret is concerned with the visual representations of the body in popular culture and
its implications on young women who are influenced by it. While Climb Inside explores an
eating disorder, her other act, Birth of a Porn Star,76 is a commentary on the social acceptability
that cosmetic surgery has gained in the service of an aesthetic ideal. Terret writes that she
‘explores the current social climate where women desperately grasp for a visual ideal and
attempt to navigate feelings of powerlessness and abjection’,77 and she wanted to perform these
at neo-burlesque venues within this genre to comment on the mainstream burlesque’s
commodified body and body dysmorphia. 73 Allen, p. 128. 74 Colette Conroy, Theatre & the Body (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 33. 75 Liselle Terret, ‘Climb Inside’, <https://youtu.be/Pk1W4vljf3A> [Accessed 24 August 2015]. 76 Liselle Terret, ‘Birth of a Porn Star’, <https://youtu.be/3GQ_D4Ak7AA> [Accessed 24 August 2015]. 77 Liselle Terret in Claire Nally, 'Grrrly hurly burly: neo-burlesque and the performance of gender' in Textual
Practice, 23.4 (2009), 621-643 (p. 634).
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In Climb Inside, Terret, or Doris La Trine, uses a pink toilet instead of Dita Von Teese’s
cocktail glass as a prop to deglamorize the body by associating it with a toilet, and to glamorize
the scatological aspects of the body, the mundane, for better acceptability of our body as more
than simply a visual object for someone else’s pleasure. While Von Teese climbs into the glass
and drenches herself with alcohol as a public spectacle, La Trine climbs into the toilet and
throws up, trying to bring to the public the most private of moments that we as humans have, and
that people suffering from bulimia undergo with some frequency. In her own words, her acts
attempt to ‘re-define and reposition the freaks in staging of the taboo. It places the Other centre
stage where s/he authors her own parodic self-representation’.78 It is important to note that in her
performance, she is once again taking control of her self-representation, depicting aspects of her
body that she wants to, driven by her ideology and creative enterprise, not an institution that she
needs to conform to, thus regaining the agency that the commercialized burlesque had lost. At
the same time, by critiquing the current representational system and the positive reinforcement it
provides to certain body types, she brings into focus not just the cultural exclusionary and
discriminatory practices that exist but also the psychological impact it inflicts on people that
negotiate such a system.
In Birth of a Porn Star, she strips down to her underwear, and using a marker, highlights
all the parts of her body she would want to be altered through surgery to attain a socially
acceptable model of beauty from high cheekbones to a thin waste and a thigh gap. Below her
breasts, in big bold letters, she proclaims, “CUT HERE” to indicate all the locations of her body
she wants to be operated upon. She ends the performance with a mask and inflated breasts to
show the final result post-surgery, an over-the-top mockery of what remains of “her body” and of
78 Liselle Terret, ‘LipsiCk: Queer Feminist Neo-Burlesque Performance Project’, <https://lipsickqueerfeministneoburlesque.wordpress.com/defining-lipsick-queer-feminist-neo-burlesque/defining-lipsick-queer-feminist-neo-burlesque/> [Accessed 20 July 2015].
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the entire ecosystem that supports it. In this goal, her attempt is not unlike, if less involved, than
Orlan actually undergoing plastic surgeries to transform herself into male ideals of beauty as
depicted in famous sculptures and paintings in her performance project Carnal Art. Her surgeries
‘altered her mouth to imitate that of François Boucher's Europa; another "appropriated" the
forehead of da Vinci's Mona Lisa; yet another imitates the chin of Botticelli's Venus’.79 Both
Terret and Orlan aim to highlight the unrealistic expectations of beauty and body type that the
society propagates, primarily for women but for all bodies in general.
Mat Fraser’s striptease on Criptease Unlimited80 at the Southbank Centre in London in
2012 is described as ‘outlandish and outrageous neo-burlesque’81 on the venue’s website. It goes
on to say ‘this show presents some of the most contentious neo-burlesque striptease artists in the
country. Come and celebrate diversity of sexuality.’ While they end with a politically correct
statement about celebration of diversity, the use of adjectives like outlandish, outrageous and
contentious, speak to the views of the organizers with respect to the place disabled bodies occupy
in society. Even if used as a controversial marketing ploy for higher ticket sales, it still indicates
the Southbank Centre’s understanding of the social context of the performance and their
assessment of their target audiences. Perhaps if we didn’t live in a society obsessed with paying
lip service to political correctness, it would have been called “A Freak Show” or “Freaktease”,
assuming the name was picked by the venue and not the artists. Compare this to the description
of Straight Up by House of Burlesque, a more conventional burlesque show. They describe it as:
Grab the salt and lemon as International showgirl superstar Miss Tempest Rose
leads you through the contents of her liquor cabinet, mixing up a cocktail of the
79 Anon., <http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/carnal.htm> [Accessed 28 August 2015]. 80 Mat Fraser, ‘Criptease Unlimited’, Southbank Centre, 31 August 2012, <https://youtu.be/s0dpIb9-Lec> [Accessed 14 August 2015]. 81 Anon., ‘Southbank Centre’, <http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/dance-performance/tickets/criptease-unlimited-66994> [Accessed 14 August 2015].
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cheekiest, cleverest, and down right stunning burlesque on the rocks… From rum
swigging pirates and showgirl Beefeaters to martini guzzling hunks and ice-cold
vodka vixens, this show gives you a hangover worth having. Come and be
intoxicated.82
This description seduces and entices, and invites audiences to revel, while the description of
Criptease comes across as more of a curiosity that needs to be satisfied. While the disabled
community and the artists in this show, and the shows in subsequent years have attempted to
reclaim the word cripple much like queer has been reclaimed by the queer community,
Criptease, a brilliant play on words, when juxtaposed against other unflattering, judgmental
words further highlights the discriminatory attitudes that exist in society for differently abled
bodies. The website does not attribute the text to anyone in particular, and it may not reflect
specifically on Southbank Centre, in light of the fact that I do not know who provided them the
text, but it certainly is indicative of an underlying social problem that goes beyond logistical
issues for handicapped access.
The performance itself is a classic example of a boylesque act, with a man stripping down
to this thong or g-string, the difference being that Mat also strips off his prosthetic arms in the
act. He combines his moves to imitate both a female and a male striptease. The way he kicks off
his shoes at the 20 second mark in the video is how a female performer would take off her
stilettos. Shaking his trousers and jacket off might have been a logistical decision for him since
he is wearing prosthetic arms but women will often shimmy out of their dress like that, as
opposed to men who prefer tearaway clothes in contemporary shows. The most telling aspect of
his performance is when he first waves his arms in an exaggerated manner a minute and twenty
82 Anon., ‘Southbank Centre’, < http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/house-of-burlesque-90593> [Accessed 14 August 2015].
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seconds into the video, and then takes them off one by one, letting them dangle between his
thighs like an erect penis before letting go, and taking off his opera gloves. At three minutes and
fifteen seconds, he settles into a strong squat position, flexing his quadriceps before ending with
a split. Through these moves, he seamlessly merges the quintessential moves of male and female
strippers, pandering to expectations of both.
I would like to focus on his actions with his prosthetic arms. An able bodied white male
is considered the prototype normative body, and all other bodies are defined as a variation of (or
more specifically, lacking something in comparison to) that body, whether it is the Freudian
concept of a psychological lack, or a more corporeal lack in the physical body. This lack
becomes an embodiment of difference, and in a society structured around the normative, of
perceived inferiority of existence. By wildly swinging his prosthetic arms, Fraser is bringing
attention to them, as if challenging the norms to say that this is what he is required to wear to
give the appearance of normal for the sake of those who cannot accept difference. Whether the
prosthetics are functional in use or purely aesthetic, for a normal existence, he needs to wear
them. When he takes them off and plants them between his thighs, they become a phallic
symbol, a symbol of strength and masculinity. In the system of binaries, abled/disabled carries an
inherent hierarchy that is not unlike the masculine/feminine construct with engendered power
relations. By taking them off his body and transplanting them between his thighs, he points out
the disparity between the kind of bodies that are considered normal and those are either
considered worthy of disgust or pity, both of which come from an unequal power dynamic. He
then discards them along with the rest of his clothing, since it is nothing more to him than a piece
of external clothing, and presents his body, with all its embodies experiences, for all to see. This
is accompanied by constant cheering and celebration by the burlesque audience, exactly as they
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did with Columbine and La Trine’s performances. This is indicative of the validation of my
claim that neo-burlesque includes and celebrates all bodies in equal measure.
Another oft talked about type of body in the entertainment business is the obese body. In
the recent years, a few such people have carved a niche for themselves on television and in films.
Celebrities like Melissa McCarthy, Rebel Wilson, Jonah Hill and James Corden have established
successful careers. Yet their success hasn’t prevented a focus on their bodies and their reel-life
personas feel the need to address the issue head on. Rebel Wilson’s character in the Pitch Perfect
movie franchise is called “Fat Amy”. Several other such instances can be found. A majority of
obese actors have been typecast in comic roles as the good-hearted, harmless buffoon or the
sidekick without sexual desire or agency. The origin of this trope can possibly be traced back to
Hattie Jacques of the Carry On films in the 1970s UK, in which she played a matronly figure
with comedic underpinnings, and a rather chaste personality. Contemporary film and television
have mostly exaggerated it further to exploit it for comedic purposes.
Neo-burlesque reconstitutes these fat bodies as sexual bodies with desires, like all other
human beings. While I could not attend a show where an obese performer performed a striptease
act (several currently perform in London), I encountered several comperes and people in other
capacities who are an integral part of the neo-burlesque world. London Burlesque Festival’s
‘Jungle Exotica’ performed in Camden Town83 was compered by Em Brulee, a self-described
vocalist, burlesque/cabaret compere and a show-woman.84 Her profile on modeling website
Model Mayhem lists her dress size as 18,85 which clothing stores classify as ‘plus size’. One
would assume that 18 would be descriptive enough, but they need to qualify it as plus size. No
minus size exists for size 0, which is again a telling indicator of social expectations. Em Brulee
83 ‘Jungle Exotica’, London Burlesque Festival, Dingwalls, London, 27 May 2015. 84 ‘Em Brulee’, < http://www.embrulee.co.uk/about/> [Accessed 21 August 2015]. 85 Anon., ‘Model Mayhem’, <http://www.modelmayhem.com/1368879> [Accessed 21 August 2015].
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is, by current social standards, obese. And very popular in the entertainment world, whether it be
burlesque or her singing assignments. Another performer who does not fit the Hollywood-esque
notion of body is Trixie Malicious, the host of Sleaze and a member of the London’s neo-
burlesque outfit, Burlexe. While there isn’t an analysis of a performance for this body type in this
section, I bring this up to highlight that of all the ones I encountered, the focus of the organizers
and the audience was on their performances, which did not revolve around their size, unlike in
popular culture; and given the setting, they clearly revealed that they had sexual desires and
agency, further deconstructing the image that Hollywood has built up for them. All these women
come on stage, dance, strip, tease, sing – seize power that social marginalization has deprived
them of.
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WHAT’S THE POINT?
The optimization of power is achieved with and through multiplication of pleasures, not through
their prohibition or restriction.86
Ridout calls performance the ‘privileged locus of expression for a radical repudiation of
bourgeois life’.87 There are certainly performances that dot the entire spectrum of extremes from
the highly commodified spectacles that seem to pander to the erotic sensibilities, to politically
charged outpourings that would be difficult to classify as entertainment. For the most part,
though, burlesque performances, as I have attempted to demonstrate, sit somewhere in the
middle, not seeking Ridout’s radical repudiation but Munoz’s disidentification, the ‘survival
strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere
that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the
phantasm of normative citizenship’.88 Burlesque burlesques the ‘oppressive and normalizing
discourse of the dominant ideology,’89 it burlesques the audiences and performers who subscribe
to that ideology, as with Emily’s Tinder chat and Russella’s drag; and it burlesques itself, as with
Terret’s pink toilet and Fraser’s prosthetic arms, when it becomes too assimilative. The guiding
principle of a burlesque performance is positive celebration of all genders, sexes, sexualities, and
bodies. It is not positioned exclusively in opposition to the archetypical social existence, but at a
healthy distance from where it critiques and affirms.
86 Foucault, p. 64. 87 Ridout, p. 12. 88 Muñoz, p. 4. 89 Muñoz, p. 97.
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I started with the question, “What’s the point?” and have hopefully exhibited through the
course of this project that the point of burlesque is a foregrounding and validation of minoritarian
subjective positions without assuming a confrontational tactic, but by disidentifying, by
attempting to transform it from within. Such a methodology should not be mistaken as
privileging the dominant heteronormative paradigm, but rather a concurrent, alternate approach
to providing a prototype for a more inclusive social setup alongside more radical movements that
highlight the injustices perpetrated on the counterpublic. Instead of focusing on the victimization
of the non-normative subjects, it highlights and ridicules the insensitivity and futility of rigid
frameworks that enable such victimization. I would like to believe that burlesque goes beyond
other movements of identity politics in that instead of lobbying for equal rights for minorities,
which is a critical aspect of such movements, it offers an insight into the kind of society one
might expect once such an objective has been attained. It is not just a mirror for all that is wrong
at present, but also a window to how the right would look like in the future.
When the Indian, the French and the Swede are surrounded by an abundance of currently
“alternate” identities in a burlesque show, they are more likely to cheer and laugh, not turn away
and walk out. And that is exactly on point.
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