Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (review)

In Gypsy, Rachel Shteir gives us a delightfully written, rich picture of an amazing, multi-talented, hard-working woman who goes from stripped-off-rags to riches. Highlighting the complexity of Gypsy Rose Lee (born Rose Louise Hovick), Shteir asserts,

[W]hen you strip away Gypsy's witty veneer, what you get instead of a cracked foundation is a glimpse of the narrow line between self-invention and the tragedy emerging from lost souls. And you find here that, whether or not she is telling the truth, Gypsy is neither a puppet nor someone's wallflower daughter forced to take it off - she is a complex and ravishing creature whose act and life reveal self-invention, poignancy, and street smarts.

(186)

And Shteir's subject was, indeed, such a smart, complex, and self-reinventing woman. Sexy and witty, Gypsy popularized an intellectualized version of striptease, which she wove through her various professional roles. She understood how moving and joking, being sexy and funny simultaneously, could "seduce" others. Gypsy set the precedent for lap dancing when in some striptease numbers she "leapt onto customers' laps" (49). Self-educated, she appreciated literature and the arts. She became an author whose articles appeared in The New Yorker and Mademoiselle and who wrote novels about herself; an actress in film and on Broadway; and a volunteer for the war effort. An activist in the Burlesque Artists' Association, Gypsy advocated for strippers' improved working conditions. She hobnobbed with socialites and stellar figures in the theatrical world. A millionaire, she adapted with the times and her physical maturity. Gypsy became a TV-talk-show emcee and also endorsed products, from Smirnoff Vodka to Voila Gourmet Dog Food.

Shteir gives a variety of perspectives on Gypsy's career. As she notes, Gypsy was loved by the public, though ridiculed by some of the critics. Nonetheless, her legend lives on in books (Keith Garebian's The Making of Gypsy, Erik Preminger's Gypsy and Me: On the Road and at Home with Gypsy Rose Lee), numerous articles, musicals (Gypsy, On Your Toes), and a ballet (Slaughter on Tenth Avenue), even as the art of striptease that she helped to popularize has declined. Shteir attributes the beginnings of this decline to an increasingly popular view that striptease was a gimmick, to the location of its performance venues in slums that were ultimately razed, to the advent of Playboy, and to the widespread attention lavished on Alfred Kinsey's reports, which lessened the taboo attraction of striptease and offered alternative access to the naked female body. Ben Urish (2004) argues, on the other hand, that support of lavish theatrical striptease productions diminished because the coming of television captured the public's attention.

Shteir asks where Gypsy belongs: "To what we would now call the sex industry?" (l22). I have observed that, for reasons of political solidarity, some prostitutes and others today have redefined the term sex work to refer to any sort of labour in which sexual pleasure or entertainment is provided in exchange for money (Hanna 2010). Yet, of dancers in particular, Dave Manack, publisher and editor of Exotic Dancer Bulletin, says, "It seems doubtful that anyone in our industry would willingly identify themselves as working in the 'sex industry.' We've never referred to it that way in our magazines or at the Expo, ever. 'Sex worker' is a damaging term; it refers to a prostitute, not a dancer." Not one of the hundreds of striptease dancers I have been interviewing in clubs since 1995 refers to herself as other than dancer, entertainer, or stripper, problematizing Shteir's proposition that Gypsy belongs to "the sex industry."

In an equally troubling way, Shteir writes of the aesthetics of the tease, "It is difficult to escape the banality of striptease. Everyone looks the same, more or less, when they take off their clothes. Striptease is not an art form, or at least not in the sense that painting is" (129). However, in the nearly 150...