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  • Teasing, Transgressing, Defining—Broadening the Spectrum of Sexy
  • Shelley Scott and Reid Gilbert

The very excess of costume and campery points to a parody of gender […] I would argue the burlesque performance must be aligned with camp, with a heavy criticism of heteronormative genders, and ultimately with the queering of identities.

Burlesque accommodates the circus freak, the tattooed lady, the diminutive woman, the Amazon—in short, multiple versions of what women are.

—Claire Nally, Grrrly Hurly Burly: Neo-burlesque and the Performance of Gender

Burlesque is the term used throughout this issue, although the word meant something very different before and after the year 1868, when Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes made their New York debut. While burlesque was originally an all-male performance form dating back to Aristophanes—low-culture parody of high culture—the Blondes added risqué humour and female display to the topical references, popular songs, and outrageous puns. Robert Allen argues that it was not so much the skimpy costumes that offended critics of the Blondes as much as their inversion of a number of male prerogatives (129). Lydia Thompson dressed as a male character who wooed the other members of the cast, yet she made no attempt to disguise her own femininity, and this kind of disturbing cross-dressing became a key feature of the many female burlesque troupes to follow. As Kristen Pullen explains, “Impersonating male attitudes and behavior while highlighting female secondary sexual characteristics, the Blondes (and especially Thompson) presented a blurred image of femininity to theatre audiences, one that upset traditional expectations of burlesque performers, female-to-male crossing, and binary gender presentation” (115). Allen describes the nineteenth-century reaction to this horror—“things that should be kept separate were united in grotesque hybrids” (29)—and Claire Nally reports that early burlesque performers were described as belonging to an “alien sex” (624).

It was not just the spectacularly parodic costumes that were excessive,1 but the sexually charismatic bodies of the women themselves. The Blondes were “buxom and curvy, a departure from earlier ideals of feminine beauty in U.S. culture” (Erdman 16) and a ready contrast to the wholesome and manageable Ziegfeld Follies girl-next-door (Allen 243). But the worst transgression was that burlesque women looked at and talked back to their audiences (Allen 129). They enjoyed themselves. They were aware of what they were doing, they were irreverent and funny, and their quality of knowingness was what critics found most horrifying of all.

Burlesque came to mean something different again when Middle Eastern belly dancing was introduced to America at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and became known as the cooch dance. In the early 1900s there was a craze for the Salomé dance, and by the 1920s there was striptease. From the 1930s to the late 1960s, the Minsky style of show became the standard: chorus lines and production numbers, baggy-pants comics and humorous skits, along with burlesque dancers who employed elaborate costumes, props, and characters, but who were never entirely naked.

Just as early burlesque was intimately connected with vaudeville and minstrel shows, burlesque of the mid-twentieth century was paralleled by big carnival revues and Broadway follies. An example in Canada is the State Burlesque Theatre in Vancouver, which opened in 1946. It had a chorus line of girls that performed before and between the big acts (American singers, comedians, and stripteasers), accompanied by a live orchestra: three or four dances a show, two or three shows a day, six days a week (Ross 98). In her nostalgic celebration of what she considers to have been a Golden Age, Jane Briggeman emphasizes the strong sense of community, even family, inside the burlesque world. Managers, agents, comics, straight men, costume designers, as well as dancers, all lamented that burlesque as they knew it had come to an [End Page 5] end (234). But as David Owen points out, the revival of burlesque has also meant the re-imagining of community.

It is helpful to make a distinction between at least two streams of burlesque as they exist currently. As Alexis Butler explains, one style is historical re-creation, a kind of nostalgic retro...

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