Burlesque Performance Research Articles

S/he's Got It All: Myths, Mechanics, and Mystery In Cross‐Dressing Striptease and Burlesque Performers

S/he's Got It All: Myths, Mechanics, and Mystery In Cross‐Dressing Striptease and Burlesque Performers

The Laugh of the Medusa

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l'ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project. I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses

The Impression Management Techniques of the Burlesque Comedian

This discussion is an in‐depth study of burlesque comics. The basic argument is that burlesque comics, like other marginal members of society, manipulate their behaviour so as to present a more favourable self‐image than the one in play in negative stereotypes. They have a detailed knowledge of the social sexual norms of the more conventional members of society and use this knowledge alternately to pass as respectable citizens and to play the role of comic in the burlesque performance.