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Grrrly hurly burly: neo-burlesque and the performance of gender

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903000554

1470-1308

Claire Nally,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dr Angela Smith and Prof Willy Maley for their judicious and enlightened comments on draft versions of this essay. Notes See Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind (Denver: Speck Press, 2004), p. 44, and p. 99 for a discussion of The World Famous *BOB*'s satire on McDonald's and modern consumerism, as well as her status as ‘female-to-female impersonator’. See also Jessica Glasscock, Striptease: from Gaslight to Spotlight (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), p. 169, for discussion of Dirty Martini's juxtaposition of ballet, fetish and striptease. Hadley Freeman, ‘Fetish Fashion’, The Guardian, 16 August 2007, pp. 10–11. Jacki Wilson, The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), p. 18. See Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York University Press, 2000), p. 66. Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (London: The Women's Press, 2000), p. 81. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 4. Whelehan, Overloaded, p. 9 notes that the Wonderbra has become symbolic of some postfeminist discourses, in that it suggests empowerment is a choice to appear confrontationally and publicly sexual, but realistically it merely appeals to the ‘male gaze’. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Paladin, 1971), p. 325. See Negra, What a Girl Wants, p. 124, for a discussion of how the makeover presents a ‘truthful revelation scene’ and ‘allay broader concerns about the stability and coherence of self and body’. Negra, What a Girl Wants?, pp. 122–3. Negra, What a Girl Wants?, p. 123, citing Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 67. ‘Bella Besame’, Interview, 14 January 2008. Cited in Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 25. William Dean Howells, ‘The New Taste in Theatricals’, Atlanta Monthly, May, 1869, pp. 642–3. Stephen Whittle, ‘Gender Fucking or Fucking Gender?: Current cultural contributions to theories of gender blending’, Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-dressing and Sex-changing, eds. Richard Ekins and Dave King (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 205. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 10. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests, pp. 10–11. ‘Lady J’., Interview, 22 January 2008. Daniel Harris, ‘The aesthetic of drag’, Salmagundi (Fall 1995), pp. 62–74, 62. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, from Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 279–80 and p. 289. Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, p. 280. Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, p. 277. Moe Meyer, ‘Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp’, in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 10. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 15. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, p. 15. ‘Peek-A-Boo Burlesque’, The Stardust Bar, Sheffield, UK, 18 August 2007. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests, p. 55. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 187. Original italics. ‘Empress Stah’, Interview, 29 August 2007. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 232. ‘Empress Stah’, Interview, 29 August 2007. Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 1. See Jessica Glasscock, Striptease: from Gaslight to Spotlight (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), p. 17. See also Steele, The Corset, p. 30. Quoted in Steele, The Corset, p. 29. Cited in Steele, The Corset, p. 59. Steele, The Corset, p. 166. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 91. For a further discussion of these influences on burlesque, see Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind (Denver: Speck Press, 2004), passim. Hebdige, Subculture, p. 94. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture became Consumer Culture (London: Capstone, 2006), p. 187. See especially Katherine Bosse's New Burlesque (New York: Art Publishers Inc, 2003). Her photographs of numerous US performers reveal this diversity: for instance the tiny Bobby Pinz (p. 23), the heavily tattooed Violetta Valentine, and the voluptuous curves of Dirty Martini (p. 13). ‘Bella Besame’, Interview, 14 January 2008. Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind (Denver: Speck Press, 2004), p. 30. For a discussion of the role of the viewer/spectator/voyeur in contemporary culture, see Jonathan Metzl, ‘From scopophilia to Survivor: a brief history of voyeurism’, Textual Practice, 18:3 (2004), 415–434. Wilson, The Happy Stripper, p. 149. Dita von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese (London: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 14. von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese, p. 15. Ibid., p. 14. Negra, What a Girl Wants?, p. 51. Negra refers to postfeminist film such as Blast from the Past (1999) and The Lakehouse (2006) as examples. Rebecca Mead, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 73. Mead, One Perfect Day, p. 73. ‘Lily Dumont’, Interview, 23 January 2008. ‘Doris La Trine’ (Liselle Terret), Interview, 26 March 2008. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Dita von Teese, Fetish and the Art of the Teese (London: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 101. Dahlia Schweitzer, ‘Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression’, Journal of Popular Culture, 34.1(2000), pp. 65–75, 68. Shteir, Striptease, p. 3. ‘Bella Besame’, Interview, 14 January 2008. Mead, One Perfect Day, p. 10. Mead, One Perfect Day, p. 73. Viv Gardner, ‘The Invisible Spectatrice: Gender, Geography and Theatrical Space’, in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, eds. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 26. See Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 77 and p. 152 for discussion of the original composition of audiences in burlesque. ‘Lady J’. Interview, 22 January 2008. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 19. Susan R. Bowers, ‘Medusa and the Female Gaze’, NWSA Journal, 2.2(1990), pp. 217–35, 218. Paul Willemen, ‘Letter to John’, Screen 21.2(Summer 1980), p. 56. Cited in Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire, p. 15. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 152. ‘Lady J’. Interview, 22 January 2008. Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 129. Elizabeth Linton, Modern Women and What is Said of Them (New York: R. R. Redfield, 1868). Cited in Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 140. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 151. Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire, p. 6.