Spectacles of Agency and Desire: Dance Histories and the Burlesque StageMain MenuKatherine Greerfc295a655478c83ef28fbc5d88f44e832ee8ba0bLilianna Kanec453f3fcecc1717732f04f989f34f22e5a4d4903Maddie Leonard-Rose7795fc6919b777a978ec7bda4587e47146d4272eMargaret Morrison70f833738ab191151c82af514f5ee008e3ec05e1Claire Staveskifd4448269ba1d9180643996c497c3b954e2e9635Rachel Sigrid Freeburg19a18a24de8629654b230af3d38b9d4e018fd92aNena Couch011ed4d85d026b7c015f3ceb81e22a57b29b69c6Harmony Bench0272c6dce71da71c341d0dca5e4d21947d1ad231
Gender Performativity and Burlesque: Exposing and Reversing the "Becoming"
12015-11-29T22:04:12-08:00Lilianna Kanec453f3fcecc1717732f04f989f34f22e5a4d490359779plain2015-12-02T14:54:03-08:00Lilianna Kanec453f3fcecc1717732f04f989f34f22e5a4d4903In 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.
12015-11-29T22:05:27-08:00Lilianna Kanec453f3fcecc1717732f04f989f34f22e5a4d4903The Stripped Body: Flesh and Social Significance19plain2015-12-03T17:39:48-08:00Lilianna Kanec453f3fcecc1717732f04f989f34f22e5a4d4903