Unruly Women
Burlesque performers use their unruliness in their performance. Lydia Thompson and her Blondes used their voices in excess as they sang and told jokes. Thompson and her troupe also used masculine costuming which called attention to the social construction of gender. Rose La Rose was famous for engaging with her audience using her voice as well as her dancing body. Gypsy Rose Lee used puns as a part of her stripping act in the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen. Performers transfixed audiences by using their bodies as well as their voices in excess. These displays of unruliness lead to the categorization of burlesque as a liminal form, something that can not be pinned down.
The nature of burlesque as a sexualized performance art caters to the voyeuristic gaze of a male audience, but the performer is not necessarily at the mercy of that gaze. Women performers can be seen as objects on the stage, placed just so, so as to make the consumption of their image most pleasing. Or they can be seen as having agency and subjectivity, depending on how ‘unruly’ they are being. Linda Mizejewski explains, “Because the unruly woman is impervious to patriarchal claims on her, she is ultimately the ‘prototype of woman as subject—above all when she lay claims to her own desire’ (31)” (23). Before the advent of burlesque in America, the desirous performer did not exist on mainstream stages. With the arrival of Lydia Thompson, in all her unruliness, burlesque performers gained a distinct advantage of subjectivity by using unruly behavior to dominate the men who watched their shows.