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

The Grotesque Body

When Lydia Thompson appeared on the New York stages in 1868 she shocked and awed audiences with her employment of masculine costuming. Early burlesque performers such as Thompson wore breeches that showed off their legs when they dressed as male characters. In burlesque this was considered transgressive. It is important to note that women had been performing in travesty roles for centuries and the breeches performance in itself was not radical. I contend that it was not so much the appearance of a woman’s body in men’s clothes that was so appalling to contemporary audiences but rather the grotesque woman’s body in those same clothes. The burlesque body is grotesque because it hyperbolizes itself and highlights itself in such a way as to displace the meaning of the individual and instead assign meaning to the distinct parts. While this is only one lens through which burlesque can be analyzed, I think it is an effective one as it takes into account the slightly disturbing bodily-ness of this art form. I am borrowing the definition of the grotesque body from Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who wrote Rabelais and His World on the carnival and grotesque, published in 1965. He writes: “The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (Bakhtin 317). The grotesque body outgrows itself to create a new body, an abstracted body that incorporates only the elements that have become caricatures of them selves. The grotesque is most concerned with the body parts that make contact between the inside and the outside world: the orifices and holes of the body. In the case of burlesque, the mouth, the breasts, and the vagina.

The grotesque body is distinct from the body of the individual. It has taken aspects of bodies, hyperbolized them, grown them so that they are bigger than themselves. Bakhtin explains: “Actually, if we consider the grotesque image in its extreme aspect, it never presents an individual body; the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception” (Bakhtin 318). The grotesque body of the burlesque performer becomes a transgressive, sexualized, masculine, other body that is born through the repetition of the acts of transgression and sexualization over time.

The grotesque body differs from “The new bodily canon, in all its historic variations and different genres, presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual…All orifices are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade” (Bakhtin 320). We can see the male body as this un-orificed, impenetrable fortress for it lacks the vagina, which engages with the world through birth. Historically in Western culture, men wore breeches and pants and women wore dresses and skirts. Burlesque’s transgression is not primarily one of gender—women in men’s clothing—the threat is in clothing the grotesque in the norms of masculinity thus challenging the status of male/masculine as complete and impenetrable. This threat struck such a dichotomous cord with contemporary audiences that they kicked Thompson and her British Blondes out of the theatre. 

 
Works Cited:

Bakhtin, M M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1968. Print.

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