Teasing, Transgressing, Defining—Broadening the Spectrum of Sexy

Abstract

Burlesque is the term used throughout this issue, although the word meant something very different before and after the year 1868, when Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes made their New York debut. While burlesque was originally an all-male performance form dating back to Aristophanes—low-culture parody of high culture—the Blondes added risque humour and female display to the topical references, popular songs, and outrageous puns. Robert Allen argues that it was not so much the skimpy costumes that offended critics of the Blondes as much as their inversion of a number of male prerogatives (129). Lydia Thompson dressed as a male character who wooed the other members of the cast, yet she made no attempt to disguise her own femininity, and this kind of disturbing cross-dressing became a key feature of the many female burlesque troupes to follow. As Kristen Pullen explains, “Impersonating male attitudes and behavior while highlighting female secondary sexual characteristics, the Blondes (and especially Thompson) presented a blurred image of femininity to theatre audiences, one that upset traditional expectations of burlesque performers, female-to-male crossing, and binary gender presentation” (115). Allen describes the nineteenth-century reaction to this horror—“things that should be kept separate were united in grotesque hybrids” (29)—and Claire Nally reports that by Shelley Scott and Reid Gilbert