Gender Performativity and Burlesque: Re-ordering the "Becoming"
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. In a Blaze Starr stripping short from the 1950’s, we can see this unpredictability. She slowly removes her gloves, and then plays with her hair, never signifying which garment would be 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 timing of tease, as opposed to ordered execution, embeds a 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 holds her carriage in a ways that extenuates her female figure (associating her natural body with her present gender expression). But as Beauvoir argues that one becomes a woman, the striptease offers a potential reversal of that becoming. Eric Schaefer 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. This is not to say that burlesque radically de-genders bodies through the removal of clothing. However, while simultaneously exploiting gender distinctions, the burlesque strip tease suggests a potential re-ordering of the ways in which one “does one’s body” (Butler 521).
Not only does stripping explore the potential re-ordering of how gender is “put-on,” stripping also transfers the significance invested in the garments (as markers of identity) to the performer’s body. While Shaefer argues that at the end of a strip tease, “We are left with flesh that is mere flesh, without social connotation” (Schaefer 57) this flesh symbolizes the materiality of our bodies as social forces. As Judith Butler says, the skin is the boundary that “exposes us to touch, that exposes us to visibility, to audibility, it articulates us as a social creature not just as an individual.” The removal of clothing and exposing of flesh does not leave us with a body rid of social meaning. Rather, the iconicization and celebration of that bare flesh in stripping empowers the body as a force in society, whether it’s reconfiguring how we conceptualize the construction of gender for that body, or the potential of subversion through unpredictability and possibility.
