DRAFT -- Not for Citation

Title:  "It is the Ugly that is so Beautiful":  Performing the Monster Beauty Continuum in Neo-Burlesque.

The Horrible Prettiness of Nineteenth-Century Burlesque

Many argue that when Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes took the New York theatre world by storm in 1868, the modern burlesque movement was born in the United States.[1]  A "boom of leg shows" capitalizing on the brevity of ballet dancers' costumes and spectacular scenery within a pretense of "highbrow" sensibility began in the 1830s and by the 1860s leg shows had became synonymous in the public imagination with burlesque.[2]  Lydia Thompson and the Blondes was a decidedly different type of leg show.  Unlike feminized spectacles that resorted to (over)using classical themes in predictable ways -- serving as one contemporary in the leg business put it as a "'clothes-line on which to hang the expressive costumes, dancers, scenic displays, etc.'" -- Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes "lampooned classical literature and contemporary culture alike".[3]  The performers in her troupe talked and often in a way that shocked Victorian-era sensibilities.  Dialogue was filled with double entendres and puns and the script could change daily to reflect current events.  Nothing was safe from the Blonde's parodic grip.  Not only did these little ladies sing bawdy songs and parody both highbrow and popular culture, they did so while inverting gender roles.  The women of the British Blondes played the men's parts in their burlesque plays which allowed for them to appear on stage, to the satisfaction of some and the chagrin of others, in (abbreviated) men's clothing.

One such critic, William Dean Howells, famously said of burlesque performers like Thompson and the Blondes, "'though they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both.  It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness.'"[4]  It was Thompson and other burlesque performers who created new ways of being that called into question how women could be represented both on stage and off.  The fear of this image of the brazen woman parodying not only highbrow and popular culture but gender itself – all the time "'aware of her own awarishness'" – was one of the driving forces behind critiques surrounding burlesque.[5]  As Richard Grant White put it in 1869, "'[t]he peculiar trait of burlesque is its defiance both of the natural and the conventional.  Rather, it forces the conventional and the natural together just at the points where they are most remote, and the result is absurdity, monstrosity.'"[6]  Reflecting on the explosion of burlesque in the prior two theatrical seasons, what the productions and the performers had in common for White was this monstrosity, this celebration of the "'incongruous and unnatural.'"[7]  Burlesque as "monstrous" was for White and is for me one of its defining characteristics.

Neo-Burlesque as Monster/Beauty

These critiques of burlesque as monstrous, absurd, and defying of the conventional could be read as a calling cards for many neo-burlesque performers.  In the 1990s performers and producers in various urban locations were creating burlesque-inspired shows and, often unbeknownst to each other, setting the stage for a burlesque revival that has exploded in recent years.  There was a "collective unconscious" of sorts as artists across the country began working within the lexicon of burlesque past to create characters that were, in the spirit of nineteenth-century burlesque performers, aware of their own awarishness.  Some performers claim they were not consciously creating burlesque but that this nomenclature was applied to their work by the press or spectators.  As the World Famous *BOB* explains, "'My performance art was already known for partial nudity, and the next thing I knew I was doing burlesque quite by accident.  Someone said, "I love your burlesque," and I thought, "Oh, that is kind of what I'm doing."  It was a subconscious inspiration.'"[8]  In 2001, the Tease-O-Rama convention allowed burlesque aficionados to meet face to face, often for the first time, and realize that the underground shows and performers that had bubbled up in urban locations across the country were not isolated, local events:  a neo-burlesque movement was emerging.

While covering the entire scope of the neo-burlesque is an impossibility in this short space, there are some common characteristics that pervade the work of these performers that makes what they do fall under the rubric of neo-burlesque.  Definitively defining burlesque is somewhat fruitless; it is a dynamic art form that has and continues to change in response to its social and historical context.  While deducing what a cabaret-singing, fire-eating "faggot" dressed up as a blue bunny has in common with a traditional fan dancer brings methodological challenges, it is important to begin theorizing the continuities in burlesque not to codify it but rather to open up a critical space that allows for continued dialogue about this ever-changing art form.  The following defining characteristics, then, are offered in the spirit of encouraging such dialogue.  Neo-burlesque is glamorous, campy, parodic, excessive, and salacious (or blue).  It has an "anything goes" sentiment that implicates both performers and spectators in its all-consuming path, creating a participatory space that often eradicates the fourth wall.  Influences differ for individuals but they may include drag and club culture; pin-up iconography and Hollywood glamour; clowning, circus, and side show arts; the swing scene and rockabilly; performance art, theatre, dance, musical theatre; and striptease, to name a few.  Though not all neo-burlesque performers are striptease artists, many consciously utilize the signifiers of striptease to dismantle (or, at the very least, to question) the stigma associated with the unveiled form.  Striptease in this context, then, is not solely about "taking off" but about "putting on" layers of meaning through the juxtaposition of what I call the four Cs:  music choice, choreography, costuming, and concept.  Many neo-burlesque acts are narrative and the end of performances is often more about the "twist" then the reveal, that subversion of theme or defying of expectations that makes audience members laugh out loud or groan at the bad pun or, as with all art, think about its meaning(s).  And, as I want to offer here, neo-burlesque is always already monster/beauty.

Joanna Frueh offers the concept of monster/beauty to theorize the meanings of the (aging) female body builder which provides a provocative framework to apply to burlesque:  "Monster/beauty is artifice, pleasure/discipline, cultural intervention, and it is extravagant and generous….Ideal beauty attracts, whereas monster/beauty very likely attracts and repulses simultaneously."[9]  It is this simultaneous attraction and repulsion that interests me here, what Buszek calls the "'bait-and-switch' technique that can suspend viewers' 'disgust over the subversive and turn it into desire.'"[10]  By offering that burlesque is monster/beauty I do not solely mean the simultaneous utilization of the seemingly divergent signifiers of the monster and the beauty, though such stagings offer a rich reading of this concept.  Rather, with monster/beauty I want to highlight the slash that suggests a space of continuity or fluidity between these two terms.  Put simply, extreme forms of beauty can be monstrous as extreme forms of monstrosity can be beautiful.  But monster/beauty also offers the blurring of these categories as a necessary possibility for their being, namely that one does not operate without the other. 

"It's the Ugly That is So Beautiful":  Performing Monsters in Neo-Burlesque

Monster/beauty suggests that there is something beautiful about monstrosity:  something human, or hyper-human, about extreme representations.  It is a seeming contradiction that by showing one's monstrosity, one demonstrates one's humanity and can reveal through that one's beauty.  The driving force for Bella Beretta's creation of the now defunct Gun Street Girls locates the coterminous relationship between the ugly and the beautiful.  She was inspired by a Tom Waits performance where "'He was taking his very sinister, twisted view of what the world is like, where it's very ugly, but it's the ugly that is so beautiful, and that's what I wanted to create with burlesque.'"[11]  Monster/beauty, then, utilizes those signifiers to break down the division between the two for monster/beauty inhabits both fields simultaneously:  she is both monster and beauty, human and animal, something to be revered and reviled.  As Scotty the Blue Bunny has succinctly put it, burlesque performers are "beautiful monsters."[12]  From Jo "Boob" Weldon's Godzilla Act to Darlinda Just Darlinda who often dons a bear suit (thereby opening up a space for the obvious pun on "bare") to Little Brooklyn's half King Kong, half Fay Wray number, countless neo-burlesque performers use prosthetics, masks, and icons of monsters in their work. 

Black Cat Burlesque uses the moniker "Monster Burlesque" to describe their work that celebrates ghoulish aesthetics, mythological themes, and features monsters such as Frankenstein, Darth Vadar, the Grim Reaper, and the Phantom of the Opera, to name a few.  Influenced by horror movies but disenchanted with the portrayal of women as "either the victim or something to be rescued," the troupe was intrigued with turning the horror movie "genre on its head" by reinventing women as powerful agents who are active and in control.[13]  Devilicia, one of the founders of the troupe, identifies two major parts she plays in Monster Burlesque.  One is the figure of the beauty, the glamorous counterpart to the monster who uses "my feminine wiles to escape or 'rescue' myself…only to discover the monster is my kind of guy."[14]  The second is to perform as a monster, "to present the 'monster' itself as the object of desire" rather than a "beast" who transforms into something "beautiful" or pretty in the end.[15]  As Devilicia puts it, "I like to juxtapose the eroticism of striptease with images that most do not relate with sex or glamour."[16]  In this, she explicitly invokes the sentiment of monster/beauty that Frueh articulates:  "Because extremity is immoderation – deviation from convention in behavior, appearance, or representation – and starkly different from standard cultural expectations for particular groups of people, monster/beauty departs radically from normative, ideal representations of beauty."[17]

Bambi the Mermaid is another artist who plays with this departure from "normative, ideal representations of beauty" in her performances and through her "CORNSTAR:  Freak Pin-Ups" series project.  Bambi produces the Sideshow by the Seashore's Burlesque by the Beach performed on the stage of the Coney Island side show during the summer months.  She also is the creator of the "Miss Coney Island" burlesque pageant that utilizes while subverting the concept and signifiers of beauty pageants.  During the 2006 Miss Coney Island pageant, one of the contestants, Rose Wood, competed in the "swimsuit" component of the pageant with a bikini made out of hot dogs.  The hot dogs served as a homage to the famous Coney Island eatery, Nathan's, while simultaneously provided a jarring juxtaposition of phallic icons and show-girl glamour; dozens and dozens of members hung around the hips of the performer (who happens to possess one of those "members" "herself").  The swimsuit competition also featured Miss Tickle who parodied the image of the perfect beauty queen by wearing a very large maxi pad which protruded out of the sides and back of her thong bikini.  Bambi the Mermaid and the contestants delight in such subversive and excessive displays that utilize while dismantling images of the beauty queen and the beauty pageant.

In addition to her "live" performances, Bambi the Mermaid also stages the monster/beauty continuum in her "Freak Pin-Ups" series that she began in 1994.  The pin-up photography series presents "girls whose physical attributes challenge mainstream ideals of conventional beauty."[18]  The dog-faced girl; the show girl with a parasitic twin protruding from her middle or a Siamese-twin head mirroring her own; chicken- and lobster-girls all utilize the signifiers of sideshow freaks and pin-up iconography to call into question the division between "attraction and repulsion."[19]  Bambi "celebrates the triumph of flaws and deformities to transform" the concept of "extreme beauty."[20]  An image of a pretty girl putting on her makeup with Coney Island in the background becomes a case study in extreme beauty:  she goes "too far," applying layers of makeup beyond the realm of normal so that her reflection is clown-like, grotesque, monstrous.  Even in her pin-up perfection, something goes wrong, calling into question whether perfect representations of female beauty are in fact simply part of the continuum of abnormal, unobtainable, and deformed images of women. 

            Through such stagings of monstrosity and extreme beauty, Bambi the Mermaid, Black Cat Burlesque, and many other neo-burlesque performers are what Kathleen Rowe calls "unruly women," women who self consciously "make spectacles of themselves for themselves" in public forums.[21]  The unruly woman, Rowe argues, has the possibility of reconfiguring "visibility as power" and unsettling social hierarchies.[22]  By making a spectacle of one's self literally and figuratively, many neo-burlesque performers emote this image of the unpredictable, unruly woman.  And, as Rowe provocatively suggests, the unruly woman is related to this notion of monster/beauty:  "Associated with both beauty and monstrosity, the unruly woman dwells close to the grotesque."[23]  The proliferation of neo-burlesque performers who utilize monsters and monstrosity in their acts clearly shows that there is an affinity for many towards the grotesque and extreme representations of unruly women.  Recognizing that beauty and desire are embedded within such images of monstrosity is pivotal to understanding the monster/beauty continuum in neo-burlesque. 

The Monstrosity of Beauty and Beauty Performativity

Understanding how beauty is always already monstrous, however, may not be as transparent as the above examples that illustrate the monster/beauty continuum.  The "horrible prettiness" Allen speaks of and uses as the title for his pivotal work on 19^th-century burlesque begins to hint at the simultaneous fear and fascination surrounding the burlesque beauty that dates back almost 150 years.  What I want to suggest here is that there is something extreme in the presentation of even the most picture-perfect burlesque performers, an exaggeration and underlying grotesqueness that belies the natural.  Ultra-glamorous show girls painstakingly construct themselves as classic beauties and serve it up for the spectators' consumption on a Swaravski-encrusted platter.  I will show how beauty in the world of burlesque is performative, and that "painting on" one's image is a form of drag that in the world of burlesque has destabilized the very concept of beauty ideals and even gender itself.

Burlesque has a long history of "painted ladies."  As Kathy Peiss shows in her study of the making of beauty in American culture, stage performers influenced Victorian-era women's relationship to beauty products and the presentation of self in the public sphere.  As Peiss shows, the "novel self-presentation" of burlesque performers such as Lydia Thompson inspired "the most daring women to emulate them."[24]  These performers, and the women who emulated them, blurred the categories between public and private and began to suggest that the theatrical could be incorporated into every day life and that, in turn, everyday life was a type of performance.  Peiss suggests that the "heightened importance of image making" offered women the possibility of remaking their faces, all the while reminding women that even "being natural was itself a pose."[25]  As it became socially acceptable for everyday women to wear makeup, beauty products allowed women the ability to "put on" a different face every day.

I am not suggesting that putting on makeup and changing one's appearance be read solely as a liberatory act, particularly when you factor in the beauty industries' commodification of and dictating of standards of beauty.  What I'd like to suggest, however, is that beauty is not an ultimate designation; it can, in fact, be constructed which allows the possibility that it may occupy a contested sight of self-ownership.  As Dita Von Teese aptly puts it, "we burlesquers tend to be beauties of the created kind."[26]  Interestingly, some of the most successful neo-burlesque performers celebrated for their beauty and glamour are almost unrecognizable out of makeup or their "drag" as it is referred to.  Makeup as drag is a fitting metaphor for understanding the performative efficacy of glamour and of neo-burlesque:  drag has had both practical and conceptual influences on the neo-burlesque movement.  Some performers began performing in gay clubs and the influence of drag on the aesthetic sensibilities of neo-burlesque is instantly recognizable.  Others have articulated an indebtedness to drag for the over-the-top theatricality, physical display of excess, and ability to create and sustain a public persona that is obligatory in neo-burlesque.  I will return shortly to the seeming irony that an art form that celebrates female beauty directly utilizes signifiers of drag culture, but what interests me at the moment is the possibility that beauty, or at the very least glamour, can be "performed" and, I want to argue, is performative.

Judith Butler has (now famously) offered the concept of gender performativity, the idea that gender is constituted through its performance.  In Gender Trouble, Butler proposes that "acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured through corporeal signs and other discursive means."[27]  Here Butler suggests that gender has no "ontological status apart from the various acts which constitutes its reality."[28]  She utilizes drag to demonstrate this concept that gender is performative:  simply put, "[t]he performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed."[29]  This suggests that gender can be imitated, and through that process Butler proposes that "drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself."[30]  If the basis of gender becomes divorced from an internal reality and if gender is constituted through its performance – through what Butler identifies as a "stylized repetition of acts" – then the "appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity."[31] 

Butler's theory was both provocative and controversial and she addressed some of the responses to her concept of gender performativity in her next major work, Bodies that Matter.  Countering criticisms that her use of drag to demonstrate gender performativity was misread as "exemplary of performativity," Butler clarifies that she was not proposing that "gender was like clothes."[32]  She argues that gender is not something we can simply put on and take off, "that one woke up in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night."[33]  Her hedging here is an interesting choice because she returns to drag in Bodies that Matter to demonstrate her concept of gender performativity:  "What is 'performed' in drag is, of course, the sign of gender, a sign that is not the same as the body that it figures."[34]

Though Butler goes to great lengths to clarify that "gender is not an artifice to be taken on or taken off at will and, hence, not an effect of choice," I am interested in extending this concept of gender as artifice, as something that can be taken on and off, in the context of neo-burlesque to beauty.[35]  Remembering that glamour is a vital component of burlesque and that glamour can, to some degree and in this context, fabricate beauty, then this offers the possibility that beauty is not an absolute designation.  And by this I do not mean simply that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but that it can be constructed or, quite literally, "painted on."  This, to some degree, undermines the power that beauty holds in our media-saturated culture that dictates the conventions of what constitutes conventional beauty.  Beauty in burlesque is about being able to fabricate and execute an image that ultimately destabilizes the hegemony of beauty. This may seem like an unnerving paradox that beauty and glamour are used to undue those very same designations.  But it seems that we can in fact employ "pretty things" as a tool, or a weapon if you will, to dismantle the power those things have over us.[36]  Being glamorous or pretty, then, is a matter of choice that comes into being through the performance; from this it follows that we can understand beauty as performative on the neo-burlesque stage. 

One of the most salient and often remarked upon features of the neo-burlesque movement is that it is inclusive of a wide range of aesthetics – from body types to age to physical appearance – that offer different images of what constitutes beauty in our culture.  The neo-burlesque movement has been noted for its unabashed celebration of all body types.  As Miss Astrid, creator and host of the VaVaVoom Room, coyly puts it in her dominatrix-inspired, fake European accent:  "'Does an eagle cry because it is not a swan?  No.  Is a dove sad because it's not a flamingo?  No.  And so it should be, ladies and gentlemen, with women.  Different shapes, different sizes, tall, short, fat, thin all are beautiful.'"[37]  Some troupes and performers exploit their physical difference as an asset:  Selene Luna, formally known as Bobby Pinz, is a 3'10" burlesque performer who capitalizes on her diminutive stature to give a different image of what glamour and sex appeal may look like.[38]  The Fat Bottom Review and the Glamazons are two troupes who require members to be "plus size" beauties.  Dirty Martini, crowned Miss Exotic World in 2004 and awarded a Golden Pasty for "Best Burlesque Body" at the New York Burlesque Festival in 2006, is a full-figured woman who has been described as Rubenesque.  Martini has become an international burlesque figure revered for her glamour, her dynamic performances, and is a role model for aspiring performers and female audience members alike.  As Baldwin explains, "[f]eeling sexy and powerful onstage and knowing that you are possibly changing the way the world looks at you and others who look like you is an incredibly rewarding by-product of the burlesque experience."[39]  The inclusiveness of multifarious body types in neo-burlesque can be liberatory for both performers and audiences and has ultimately reconfigured, albeit in a small way, what constitutes "beauty" both on stage and off.  If beauty is indeed performative then the neo-burlesque movement has provided a space (and a stage) where alternative images of what constitutes beauty are displayed and come into being.

Hyper Femininity and Transgressing Gender:  "Is that a Dude?"

            Though the neo-burlesque stage has embraced the presentation of physical extremity, many performers and audience members are not necessarily interested in the transformative staging of monster/beauty or the "performance art" side of burlesque.  Many performers wish, quite simply, to create phantasmagorias of glamour and beauty.  Claiming to have been an average-looking child, Dita Von Teese has made an art out of – and has received national attention for – constructing and performing a hyper-feminine beauty ideal.[40]  Influenced by cheesecake pin ups, MGM Technicolor movies, the queens of burlesque of the 1940s and 50s – Lili St. Cyr, Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee – Von Teese's mantra, "Glamour above all else," is the impetus behind her creation of dream worlds of excess and illusion.[41]  She is, by all meanings of the phrase, a glamour queen, a case study in pin-up perfection.  But her hyper-femininity is hardly "normal" – she fabricates her own beauty and pushes it to a level of spectacular excess.  With perfect Betty Page bangs, tiny waists cinched in with corsets, and miles of rhinestones and ostrich feathers, performers like Von Teese stage the excesses of glamour and hyper-femininity which, to some degree, further perpetuates the artifice of gender.  On the surface, it is difficult to locate the "monstrosity" in such stagings of beauty and glamour.  What I would like to suggest, however, is that the space of the neo-burlesque stage has reconfigured even these picture-perfect representations as a form of extremity, an exaggeration that implicates the monster/beauty continuum in its spectacular stagings..

            In a proto-typical neo burlesque show in New York City, the picture perfect pin ups share the stage with the monsters of burlesque and a handful of male burlesque performers (or "boylesque" as it has been termed).  The boylesque performers range from Rose Wood –  a female impersonator whose oeuvre includes acts as nun, a "Hooter's girl" (thereby exploiting the ultimate signifiers of masculine desire:  beer, chicken wings, and tits) and, of course, a glamorous showgirl – to Tigger! who pushes on the boundaries of gender and self-representation in his hyper-acrobatic acts and exaggerated theatrical styling.  Many performers explicitly test preconceived notions of gender binaries in their performances and in the ways they define themselves.  Often burlesque performers refer to themselves as "female drag queens" and describe dressing as "getting into drag."  Leroi the Girl Boi is a "gender blender" performer who performs in "drag" – both in male and in hyper-feminine show girl drag.[42]  The World Famous *BOB* refers to herself as a "female female impersonator" -- a term that Rowe Kathleen also uses to describe Mae West – as she elaborates on in her one-woman show titled "FTF."[43]  This reference to "female to female" – a label used by some transgender people to designate that though they were born with male bodies they always considered themselves female – has interestingly been codified by a new monthly show in New York City called "Victoria," a queer performance and party geared towards "FTFs, faux queens & the gay men trapped in our vaginas."[44]  These performers and producers are toying with the hegemony of gender binaries by offering up gender fluidity and aligning their presentations of self with queer-identified performance spaces, histories, and people.

            The appropriation of terms such as "FTF" or "drag queen" by female performers performing in female drag is conceptually fascinating but potentially problematic.  While literature on and by trans communities has clearly articulated that transpeople be able to self-identify, there seems to be an important distinction between the female-gendered woman who identifies as "FTF" and the transperson who identifies as "FTF."[45]  And while I do not care to replicate dominant culture's dictating what constitutes appropriate behavior and self-representation of particular bodies, it is important, at the very least, to open up a discussion about the appropriation of terminology invented by and used by marginalized subjects.  When I presented this very conundrum to Rose Wood, she replied, "[Female drag queens] are excessive but not subversive.  That's the difference to me."[46]  There is a material difference in a woman dressing up as a hyper-feminine woman and a man dressing up as a woman, a material difference that may very well have punitive damages in particular contexts.  At the same time that I concede material difference, acknowledge Wood's important distinction, and raise concerns over appropriating language, I'd like to suggest that what happens on the neo-burlesque stage can be transgressive and that stagings of hyper-femininity by biological women can be (though they are not necessarily) subversive. 

            Further scholarship is needed on the relationship between the female-bodied woman performing a hyper-stylized representation of woman and the history of drag and counter culture.  While Pamela Robertson provocatively sheds light on "feminist camp practices," she also concedes that "[a]ny discussion of women's relationship to camp will inevitable raise, rather than settle, questions about appropriation, co-optation, and identity politics."[47]  Even Esther Newton, the anthropological queen of binaries, acknowledges women artificially construction images of women, albeit in a footnote, to her groundbreaking study of female impersonators.[48]  Newton's study, though problematic, is an important cultural artifact in itself; rather than vilify or exonerate her and/or that study, instead I'd like to offer it up as a useful tool for theorizing the female-bodied drag queen.  Others such as Robertson and Cleto have done a more thorough job of tracing and theorizing the relationship between female bodies and camp sensibility and though "resolving" this conundrum is an impossibility, I would like to offer up the possibility that women presenting hyper-femininity can be considered a form of drag that is intimately related to camp culture.[49].  What interests me here – and what I want to highlight -- is the juxtaposition of different stagings of gender on the neo-burlesque stage and the multifarious effects of such collisions.  By sharing the stage, the "femme drag" performers and "boylesque" performers and the "monster/beauties" of burlesque create "dreamworlds of phantasmagoria" where a traditional concept of gender is turned on its head.[50]

            And this brings us to one of the most baffling yet conceptually rich byproducts of the neo-burlesque stage, a phenomenon that will help us think through my proposition that stagings of hyper-femininity can be subversive and transgressive:  at times the picture perfect feminine ideal of beauty gets misrecognized as a man.  When Rose Wood first saw Delirium Tremens – a traditional burlesque performer whose accolades include winner of the "Miss Betty Page" contest – Wood asked, "Who is that fabulous transvestite?"[51]  While Wood invokes this story as a playful introduction to Tremens' act, others occasionally seem genuinely confused by the representations of gender that they are witnessing.  One often hears audience members question glamorous female performers:  "Is that a dude?"  Hyper-femininity in this space of transgression can and does get misrecognized.  Outside the space of the neo-burlesque stage (or other stagings of gender transgression) it is inconceivable that women like Delirium Tremens or Harvest Moon or Julie Atlas Muz could be misrecognized as men.  It is as if they are too pretty to be girls, that such perfections of beauty (and gender) could only be copied by an imitator.  They become, in their hyper-femininity, an emblem of the artifice of gender that throws unknowing bystanders' perceptions for a loop and suggests that gender ideals can be copied and that, ultimately, what is "feminine" is not reducible to appearance or essence.  This is nothing new in feminist theory; but how do we account for the "punitive damages" for even those who "do their gender right," as these cases of misrecognition suggest?  As Butler offers, "Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all."[52]  "Performing their gender well" in this instance does not codify an "essentialism of gender identity" but instead suggests that reductive gender binaries are always already suspect, even by those indebted to maintaining such binaries..

Though misrecognizing a hyper-feminine woman as a man may seem inconceivable, I understand the audiences' confusion.  There is a certain expectation one may have when going to a burlesque show.  Burlesque offers a heterosexual posturing of sorts, a tease that may allude to a narrative of heterosexual foreplay.  As Ann Pelligrini has pointed out in the case of male and female bodybuilding, "What emerges most conspicuously from this heterosexual posturing is precisely its sexual indifference" (160).  By indifference she does not mean nonchalance but rather a difficulty in deciphering:  similarly, neo-burlesque capitalizes on such heterosexual posturing while offering up sexual indifference.  In this world of gender inversion, gender play, and hyperstylized representations of "woman," what is "shown" can be misrecognized:  picture-perfect female forms become emblematic of men's attempts to imitate women.  The monsters of burlesque, the boylesque performers, and the general inversion of social norms can create a transgressive space that makes even "straight" representations of women suspect.  Like Howells' critique of nineteenth century burlesque performers as "creatures of an alien sex," beauty becomes a monstrosity of gender confusion, a space where pinup perfection becomes alien and other. 

The neo-burlesque performer is always already monstrous, and through these exaggerated and extreme representations she becomes something to be feared.  If a "monster" is a sign of imminent evil, a physically malformed being that belies nature, then the impending evil of this ideal of beauty and object of desire may be that she's hiding a "little secret" between her legs.[53]  Misrecognition in this instance may be read as an attempt for heterosexual male audience members to avoid homosexual desire.  Denying the female performer her gender becomes, ironically, a way for some audience members to safeguard their heterosexuality.  Yet there is a deliciously subversive byproduct of these attempts to maintain heteronormativity; namely, that such a response unknowingly contributes to queering of the neo-burlesque space.  Utilizing the signifiers of glamour, femininity, and sexual (and sexualized) excess, neo-burlesque performers are able to dismantle the permanency of those designations and of gender itself.  I would like to suggest that occupying this space of the slash, for lack of a better term, between monster/beauty not only designates a "third space" but radically transforms the staticness of the other two terms.  In other words, not only can one occupy, simultaneously, binary opposites, but both are necessary possibilities for the other to exist.  Performers of the neo-burlesque stage can be both monsters and beauties, human and animal, masculine and feminine.  And the monster/beauty of neo-burlesque transforms the monster as beautiful and the beautiful as monstrous.

Towards a Conclusion:  Neo-Burlesque Performers as Image and Image Maker

Ultimately and unavoidably, an art form that celebrates the reclaiming of the sexualized body can also be considered a contested site of ambivalence.  It is difficult to divorce the scantily-clad female form on stage from preconceptions of what that connotes in our social order.  Even some scholars who have written extensively on burlesque have been unable to get past the assumption that striptease is ultimately (and reducible to) stripping.[54]  As Allen aptly warns, we should avoid viewing "resistant forms of cultural production as unproblematically and unambiguously progressive."[55]  While sexualized images of women are undeniably exploited on the neo-burlesque stage, the utilization of the signifiers of the playboy bunny and the burlesque queen in such a self-conscious and self-directed way ultimately calls into question the inability to reduce such iconography into a simple binary.  Boys dressing up as girls, and girls wanting to dress up as boys dressing up as girls, and girls simply trying to be pretty being misidentified as boys throws a wrench in the simple equation of "girl - clothes = google-eyed boy."  Vivian Patraka describes the explosion of such binaries as "binary terror," "the terror released at the prospect of undoing the binaries by those who have the most to gain from their undoing."[56]  Part of this terror, I want to suggest, is bound up in the central role monstrosity plays in neo-burlesque. 

Neo-burlesque is a decidedly queer art form wrapping itself up in a genre built on misogyny; it's post-post feminism that has turned around and found delight in showgirl glamour and has appropriated the icon of the pinup as a possible sight of transgression.  As Buszek provocatively argues, the pinup represents a paradoxical representation of "not just feminist sexuality, but of feminism itself."[57]  Similar in many regards to Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes' groundbreaking nineteenth-century burlesque plays, neo-burlesque is often about parody, poking fun, and pushing on the boundaries of what is "acceptable" representations of women in the public sphere.  One could argue that these performers are both object and subject or, in the words of Carolee Schneemann, "'an image and an image-maker.'"[58]  What I'd like to suggest is that conceding the point that burlesque is not "unproblematically or unambiguously progressive" does not contradict the idea that neo-burlesque is monster/beauty.  In fact, it seems to serve as a catalyst for such a discussion, opening up a space where the scantily clad female on stage can be progressive, can invoke discussion, and, in the spirit of this paper, can be both monster and beauty.  As Frueh puts it, the "monster defines expectation" and it is in that carnivalesque space where anything goes that neo-burlesque resides in all of its monstrous beauty and beautiful monstrosity.[59]

Works Cited:

Allen, Robert.  Horrible Prettiness:  Burlesque and American Culture.  Chapel Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Baldwin, Michelle.  Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind.  Denver:  Speck Press, 2004.

Bunny, Scotty the Blue.  Guest Lecturer, "History of American Burlesque."  New York University, New York.  1 Aug. 2006.

Buszek, Maria Elena.  Pin-Up Grrrls:  Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture.  Durham:  Duke University Press, 2006.

Butler, Judith.  Bodies that Matter:  On the Discursive Limits of "Sex".  New York:  Routledge, 1993.

–––.  Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.  New York:  Routledge, 1990.

–––.  "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution."  In Performing Feminisms:  Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Sue-Ellen Case.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Cleto, Fabio, Ed.  Camp:  Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject:  A Reader.  Ann Arbor:  The University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Cromwell, Jason.  Transmen and FTMs:  Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities.  Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1999.

D'Amour, Carrie (a.k.a. "Devilicia"), e-mail to author, 13 February 2007.

Darlinda, Darlinda Just.  e-mail to author, 24 January 2007.

Frueh, Joanna.  Monster/Beauty:  Building the Body of Love.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2001.

FTF.  By The World Famous *BOB.*  Mo' Pitkins House of Blues, New York.  September 2006.

Goldwyn, Liz.  Pretty Things:  The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens.  New York:  Regan, 2006.

Moore, Mignon R.  "Lipstick or Timberlands?  Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities."  Signs:  Journal  of Women in Culture and Society 32 no. 1 (2006):  113-139.

Paris is Burning.  Directed by Jennie Livingston.  Miramax Films, 1991.

Patraka, Vivian M.  "Binary Terror and Feminist Performance:  Reading Both Ways."  Discourse 14 no. 2 (Spring 1992):  163-185.

Peiss, Kathy.  Hope in a Jar:  The Making of America's Beauty Culture.  New York:  Owl Books, 1998.

Pellegrini, Ann.  Performing Anxieties:  Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race.  New York:  Routledge, 1997.

Robertson, Pamela.  Guilty Pleasures:  Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna.  Durham:  Duke University Press, 1996.

Rowe, Kathleen.  The Unruly Woman:  Gender and the Genres of Laughter.  Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1995.

Schneider, Rebecca.  The Explicit Body in Performance.  New York:  Routledge, 1997.

Shteir, Rachel.  Striptease:  The Untold History of the Girlie Show.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2005.

Sobel, Bernard.  Burlesque:  An Underground History of Burlesque Days.  New York:  Farrar & Rinehart, 1951.

Von Teese, Dita.  Burlesque and the Art of the Teese/Fetish and the Art of the Teese.  New York:  ReganBooks, 2006.

Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1982.

Womanizer.  Exhibition Catalogue.  New York:  Deitch Projects, 2007.

Wood, Rose.  Starshine Burlesque.  Raffifi, New York.  8 March 2007.

_____. personal correspondence.  Diva Ball, New York University, New York.  24 October 2007.