In her book, Choreographing Difference, Ann Cooper Albright cites 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 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.
