Spectacles of Agency and Desire: Dance Histories and the Burlesque Stage

Unpredictability and Gender Codes: Blaze Starr's Stripping Short

In looking at women’s stripteases from the mid 20th century, we can see a performed physicality of unpredictability through the tease.  These performances of female identity shake up the stability of pre-existing gender schemas, such as domesticity and passivity.  In a Blaze Starr stripping short from the 1950s, we can see this unpredictability.  She slowly removes her gloves, and then plays with her hair, never signifying which garment she will shed next.  She lifts up her skirt, but then puts it back down as if playing a joke on her viewers.  She then lifts her skirt again, but just uses it as a fan to fan herself.  After a while, she removes her garter, and then quickly and unexpectedly throws it at the camera. As viewers, we do not know what order she will strip her various layers of clothing and garments.  We do not know how much she will end up revealing.  We do not know the extent to which she will dance.  The performed physicality of the tease tailors the viewer’s attention to wondering what could happen next to this body.  The tease exhibits the performer’s agency to continue as she so pleases, and to what extent.  The unpredictable timing of the tease, as opposed to a predictable ordered execution, embeds power in the body that teases.

The burlesque striptease relies heavily on the gender codes that it simultaneously potentially dismantles.  The striptease begins with the performer dressed in garments that act as signifiers that establish a gendered woman.  Take Blaze Starr’s stripping short: She enters the screen wearing a glamorous dress, a fur scarf, a sparkly purse, and a delicate hat.  She fluffs her curled hair, twirls her purse, and carries herself in a way that extenuates her female figure (associating her biological body with her present gender expression).

Consider Simone de Beauvoir's statement that one becomes a woman.  This statement suggests that "the female body is the arbitrary locus of the gender woman," as gender "is the cultural meaning and form that the body acquires" through repeated acts that work to reproduce it (Butler 35).  The striptease begins with a culturally identifiable, hyper-feminine woman, and through routine and repetition removes signifiers of gender, offering a potential reversal of that "becoming."  Eric Schaefer, author of "The Obscene Seen: Spectacle and Transgression in Postwar Burlesque Films," articulates this notion in saying that “by removing an article of clothing that marks difference, the stripper had thrown one of the marks of gender distinction out the proverbial window, and with it the notion of fixed gender identity” (Schaefer 57).  Starr acknowledges each garment before she removes it, as if to acknowledge the garment’s significance as a player in the game of becoming.   We can not claim that stripping radically de-genders bodies through the removal of clothing.  However, while simultaneously exploiting some markers of gender distinctions, the burlesque strip tease suggests a potential re-ordering of the ways in which one “does one’s body” (Butler 521). 
Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. “Sex and Gender in Simone De Beauvoir's Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 35–49. Web. 11 Nov. 2015

Schaefer, Eric. “The Obscene Seen: Spectacle and Transgression in Postwar Burlesque Films.” Cinema Journal 36.2 (1997): 41–66. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.

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