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).

  17  of  53  

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.  

  20  of  53  

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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