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299 35 “I’m Allowed to Be a Sexual Being” The Distinctive Social Conditions of the Fat Burlesque Stage D. Lacy Asbill The lights dim as jazz music fills the room. A voluptuous woman steps into the spotlight, wearing a man’s suit and top hat. The woman begins to dance around the stage, lightly landing on the balls of her feet as she twirls, leaps, and spins to the music. She is amazingly graceful and fluid in her steps. As she moves, she begins to slowly strip out of her suit. First, she slips off her jacket. Then, in one quick motion, she drops her pants, revealing men’s silk boxers ! The audience roars with laughter. The dancer bats her eyelashes playfully in response, shimmying out of her boxers. Placing her foot on a chair, she rolls a stocking up her fleshy leg, hooking it into a garter belt. Next, she bends over and removes her hat; her voluminous red curls fly through the air as she flips her head back. She unbuttons her white shirt very slowly, teasing the audience. Electricity binds the dancer and the audience together; we hang on her every movement. Finally, she snaps open her shirt, ripping it off her body, and shakes her broad corseted chest to the audience’s delight. As the song comes to a close, the dancer bends over, reaches into her corset , and releases her massive breasts. Wrapping a thick arm around her chest so as not to reveal her nipples, she lifts her other arm triumphantly into the air, winks at the audience and skips off stage— the perfect tease! The audience groans and shifts in their seats, clapping and shouting accolades at the stage. I hear a man behind me say, “Finally! We got to see something substantial!” —Author’s field notes, Peachy Plush (pseudonym) at Theatre Luxe, July 18, 2005 In modern burlesque performance, fat women’s bodies are both revealed in their fleshy materiality and revealing of contemporary discourse about embodiment. Fat burlesque dancers use the performance space to present, define, and defend their sexualities, resisting a backdrop of medical and social discourses that inform their everyday lives. Although the fat body commonly represents a burgeoning public 300 D. Lacy Asbill health epidemic, burlesque performance redefines the fat body as an object of sexual desire and as home to a desiring sexual subject. Through the sensuous art of striptease , these performers invoke, inhabit, and challenge limiting cultural conceptions about fat women’s sexuality, purposefully creating social commentaries about their “abject” bodies. In this interdisciplinary, qualitative study, I use field observations and individual interviews to present a new vision of fat embodiment. The social conditions of the burlesque stage offer resources to fat performers and audience members who want to experience their bodies in new and affirming ways. Burlesque is a form of erotic entertainment; therefore, fat women who step onto the eroticized context of the burlesque stage are immediately marked as sexual, without question or challenge. Brownie (pseudonym), a queer white woman in her twenties who has performed with the Corpulent Cuties and Bodacious Burlesque, explains that contemporary burlesque is “a way that women of unconventional beauty can display themselves and be sexual in public” (Interview, October 20, 2005). In a culture that rarely associates fat bodies with sexuality, publicly claiming sexual agency, desire , and desirability allows fat women to take pleasure in their bodies. For example, Tonsa Tush (pseudonym), a twenty-four-year-old bisexual African American women who has danced with Detroit Shimmy for three years, shares, “I like that in this setting , I’m allowed to be a sexual being. I’m allowed to be a sexual being. Yeah, I’m a big mamma, but you’re going to like me anyway. In this place, it’s allowed to think I’m beautiful. It’s allowed to look at me and be like, ‘Damn, she’s hot.’ After a performance , it’s usually just like, ‘You’re amazing. Thank you.’ And that’s, that is just awesome that even I get that too” (Interview, November 6, 2005). Tonsa Tush explicitly contrasts the feelings and actions that are “allowed” in the burlesque scene with the possibilities of her everyday life. In burlesque, she is beautiful, hot, sexual, amazing. Her words “even I get that too,” however, imply that people in other social settings fail to recognize her sexuality. Emphasizing that she is “allowed to be a sexual being ” while on the burlesque stage...

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