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

Presence: Commanding a Gaze

Contrary to the idea that “looking is power and being looked at is powerless” (Kotz 50), empowerment can manifest through being the subject of a gaze.  Classic stripping films in the 1950s exemplify this power.  The burlesque films of the 1950s focus on the un-contained, undomesticated female body as a spectacle.  Schaefer articulates: “In burlesque films women strutted, pranced, swung their arms, bumped their hips, poured out of, and then stripped off their costumes in what appeared to be a flood of uncontained sexual display.  The women on screen met the gaze of the spectator, acknowledged that gaze, and defiantly invited him to look further.” This is not to argue that all strippers’ psyche is the same.  Of course, we cannot assume that all strippers viewed their presence as spectacle in the same empowering way.  In fact we see quite the contrary in accounts of interviews of strippers in 1968.  But in labeling the presence as spectacle as objectifying, we deny the possibility of the felt power through commanding a gaze.

In her book Choreographing Difference, Ann Cooper Albright cites Elizabeth Hollander and her discussion of figure modeling and the power in presence.   Hollander explains how it is difficult to analyze a figure model’s experience through looking at a painting, as the painting is a representation of that model crafted by someone else.  Hollander then goes on to discuss the possibilities of empowerment in being both an “object of attention” and a “subject for art.”  Albright writes, “Ostensibly, there is little to do, and yet the doing itself can be rewarding, even personally satisfying” (Albright 15).  Hollander locates a subjectivity in the act of posing, and articulates this subjectivity as “performative presence” (16).   She distinguishes this subjectivity, and this commanding of stage with how we usually conceptualize performance with drama and action.  Because modeling lacks action in this way, the model must have a “’consciousness of one’s presence as expressive in and of itself’” (16). 

If we look at pinup photographs, and photographs of strippers, we cannot figure their experience and label their act of modeling as empowering or not.  But we can acknowledge that their role in commanding attention, and gaze has a subjectivity and therefore potentiality for empowerment.
 
Works Cited:

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

 

Kotz, Liz. "Striptease East & West: Sexual Representation in Documentary Film." Framework 0.38 (1992): 47. ProQuest. 22 October 2015.

 

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