Popular Bodies, Canonical Voices: Paula Vogel's Hot ‘n’ Throbbing as Performative Burlesque

Abstract

Since many of Paula Vogel's plays rewrite canonical texts, position women centre stage, and use humour to approach uncomfortable topics, her plays employ a dramaturgical strategy that might be called a “performative burlesque.” As both a historical form and a dramaturgical strategy, burlesque is part of the history and theory of performance. While camp is the broader aesthetic within which Vogel works, burlesque foregrounds an eroticized female spectacle. Hot ‘n’ Throbbing responds to a history of discursive violence, positioning that history alongside the embodied history of the stripper. These two strands of history are enacted by the figures of “The Voice” (male) and the “Voice Over” (female). In this play, Vogel juxtaposes bodies and voices, high and low cultural forms, and sexuality and violence, highlighting the ambiguous functions of the sexualized female body in popular culture, as it both enacts and contradicts the voices of legitimate history.