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

Gender Performativity and Burlesque: Exposing and Reversing the "Becoming"

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In her book, Choreographing Difference, Ann Cooper Albright, a renowned dancer and scholar, cites gender theorist Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity, and how the repetitions of a gendered physicality render a sense of stability in identity.  Albright then goes on to question how one can interrupt this stability, and perform a physicality that establishes an unstable identity/body (Albright 9).  While burlesque relies heavily on codes of gender, particularly through costuming and gesture, the nature of stripping and the strip tease simultaneously uses these differences to deconstruct them; the strip tease represents a potential dismantling of the stability of the gendered body. While the “tease” renders unpredictability and a sense of “what if,” the striptease also highlights signifiers of gender codes to then show a possibility of (partial) deconstruction and interruption.  As the french existentialist and author of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir undermines gender essentialism, articulating that to be a woman means to have become a woman (Butler 522), the strip tease introduces the woman that has already "become" a woman, and then demonstrates a potential reversal of that becoming. By virtue, the striptease exposes a some-what liberated body with the potential to transgress from norms and schemas.  This transgressive potential symbolizes the performer’s agency to reconfigure how viewers can conceptualize a body’s lived reality in a social world.
Works Cited:

Albright, Ann Cooper. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Wesleyan University Press: 1997. 1-20. Print.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1988): 519–531. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.

This page has paths:

  1. Table of Contents Harmony Bench

Contents of this path:

  1. Unpredictability and Gender Codes: Blaze Starr's Stripping Short
  2. The Stripped Body: Flesh and Social Significance

This page has tags:

  1. "Un-Ruly" Rachel Sigrid Freeburg
  2. The Burlesque Body Rachel Sigrid Freeburg
  3. Liminality Rachel Sigrid Freeburg
  4. Lilianna Kane Lilianna Kane
  5. Striptease Rachel Sigrid Freeburg
  6. Gender Roles Rachel Sigrid Freeburg