“I am a stripper,” states author Lynn Sally in the very first sentence of her new book, Neo-Burlesque: Striptease as Transformation. In doing so, she situates herself within this realm that she has inhabited as a performer, host, producer, scholar, and teacher since the 1990s. This provocation also points to the performance style of neo-burlesque itself: a form in which performers literally “lay their politics, ideas, and critiques about social issues and norms bare onstage” (10). Noting her decision to identify herself as a stripping body is a decision that is not without risk. Sally is quick to point out that the taboo against stripping has real consequences, as burlesque performers have lost jobs because of their involvement in burlesque, and academic studies on erotic entertainment have received backlash and negative publicity. Sally states that to “hide behind the purported shield of scholarly objectivity would have erased my decades of experience with the culture and performing art that I seek to illuminate here” (xi). Instead, using an interdisciplinary array of tools from critical ethnography, performance studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, Sally dives into the “messy, controversial place that the stripping body occupies” (xi) while on a mission to add to an admittedly thin body of existing academic literature that centers the neo-burlesque performer as the main subject of inquiry.
While there already exists a rich, nuanced array of scholarly texts in dance and performance studies that explore movement, gender, and sexuality, few of these texts directly engage with neo-burlesque. Books such as Sherrill Dodd's Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance (Reference Dodds2011), or Hannah Schwadron's The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in U.S Popular Culture (Reference Schwadron2018), situate neo-burlesque as part of larger projects investigating popular culture, also frequently utilizing an ethnographic approach amongst their varied methodologies. Meanwhile, books dedicated entirely to burlesque as the main subject primarily focus on burlesque as a historical phenomenon, such as Rachel Shteir's Striptease: The Untold History of the Girly Show (Reference Shteir2004), Robert Allen's Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Reference Allen1991), and Leslie Zemeckis's Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America (Reference Zemeckis2014). Jacki Willson's The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (Reference Willson2007), and Clare Nally's “Grrrly Hurly Burly: Neo-Burlesque and the Performance of Gender” (Reference Nally2009) and “Cross-Dressing and Grrrly Shows: Twenty-First Century Burlesque,” (Reference Nally, Nally and Smith2013) offer in-depth analysis of contemporary burlesque, gender, and politics, to which Sally's book is indebted. While this is not a comprehensive list, it points to a gap within the breadth of dance and performance studies literature: the analysis of neo-burlesque's contemporary possibilities, particularly as an art form that has the potential to explode, subvert, or offer alternative possibilities for the performing body.
Sally's book addresses that gap. Each chapter is a story wherein Sally analyzes a particular performer's engagement with “performing gender using the body (often the explicit body) as a primary agent of self-expression” (39). For example, Sally theorizes the political foundations of Julie Atlas Muz's “You Don't Own Me” rope escape number, which “unpacks the seeming contradictions that contradiction that stripping can be used by feminists to dismantle patriarchal bonds” (53). Julie Atlas Muz uses “politically pointed nudity” (193) as a “residual remembering” of female performance artists from the 1960s and 1970s who foregrounded the explicit body as a tool of expressive body politics. Many of these artists were “railing against artistic conventions and how the body—especially women's bodies—were treated …” (208–209), conventions that Muz still encounters and pushes against. In the act “You Don't Own Me,” Muz escapes a full-body rope binding to the tune of Leslie Gore's song “You Don't Own Me,” nodding to the avant-garde performances that influenced the development of neo-burlesque. Using this example, Sally demonstrates how “Muz uses exhibitionism to shock her audience into thought and into action” (194). The striking image of Muz's body bound in ropes creates an arresting visual and narrative while demonstrating a “burlesque approach to performance: she takes a topic or idea, turns it on its head, and uses her explicit body to communicate her message” (217).
In a divergence from Muz's use of shock, Sally describes Little Brooklyn's comedic stylings, which nod to burlesque's roots in parody. Using a “bait-and-switch technique that's pervasive in burlesque, comedy and humor are used to hook spectators. Comedy helps spectators digest, enjoy, and engage with the performance …” (121). Sally argues that Little Brooklyn's 1950s housewife performance and its use of the archetypal housewife figure “allows her to simultaneously pay homage to and distance herself from what that means historically, socially, and politically.… Through her failure to perform ideal femininity, Brooklyn pokes fun at the 1950s housewife archetype to explode it” (124). Citing José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification, Sally describes how Little Brooklyn's funny failings resist “fixing” that archetype “within the state power apparatus. Instead, Brooklyn sends up the damaging archetype of obligatory domesticity with hilarious results” (125). In other words, rather than re-creating a nostalgic image of a bygone era, Little Brooklyn uses that image to create political commentary, critique, or counternarrative. Much like Muz's ability to flip an idea on its head, Little Brooklyn subverts the gendered expectations of women by repeatedly failing at their performance.
Throughout the chapters runs the assertion that “burlesque creates a queer space that challenges, disrupts, and even subverts gender norms” (51) and that the highly staged, constructed, and theatrical performance of gender “offers a counternarrative that flaunts, teases, and throws assumptions about gender to the wind” (50). Each performer deploys that flaunting and teasing through a variety of methods, but all are connected through the counternarratives that each unruly, explicit body creates and reveals onstage. Sally interprets these performances through lenses of camp, pageantry, parody, and comedy, revealing the plethora of tools neo-burlesque performers pull from to construct their unruly onstage bodies. Demanding that we take their voices and creations seriously, Sally utilizes extensive interviews as well as rich descriptions of their onstage creations. World Famous *BOB* and Dita von Teese's specific constructions of high femme beauty can be read beyond reproduction of social beauty norms, Sally argues, and the agitprop theatrics deployed in Bambi the Mermaid's annual Miss Coney Island parodic pageant celebrate the irreverent via poking fun at artifice and pageantry. Interlocutors include José Esteban Muñoz, Clifford Geertz, Laura Mulvey, J. Jack Halberstam, Linda Mizejewski, Meredith Heller, and Rebecca Schneider. Her rich descriptions and choreographic analysis of prominent New York City burlesque figures, such as Dirty Martini, Little Brooklyn, Julie Atlas Muz, MsTickle, Bambi the Mermaid, and World Famous *BOB*, set the stage for the reader to experience these sparkly, parodic, and political performances as close to that in-the-moment experience as words can capture, conveying Sally's deep commitment to and connections with this community.
Sally's book ends by tying together the idea of the sexual agency claimed by neo-burlesque artists with the recent political reclamation of the term “nasty woman.” (As seen in the January 2016 March on Washington and the viral spread of the hashtag #nastywoman. After a Trump tweet declaring her “nasty,” San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz responded by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the very word that had been intended as a pejorative, but she instead boldly claimed and proclaimed it in all capital letters.) The brash, loud, and unapologetic “nasty women” feminism claims the right to bodily expression in ways that neo-burlesque artists do onstage in a complex and contradictory manner. Feminism, “like the wide range of women it is meant to represent, responds to, changes with, and transforms the culture in which it exists” (231), much like the ways in which burlesque as an art form has shifted, expanded, and more recently exploded in response to its sociocultural context. This conclusion reads like a call to action: for other feminist scholars, performers, and activists to continue the unruly work of these women both onstage and off.
Neo-Burlesque: Striptease as Transformation not only adds to a small, but growing body of literature on this performance phenomenon, but also could lay the groundwork for forthcoming scholarship. Given the wide array of theoretical and methodological tools present in Sally's analysis, this text will likely join scholars such as Sherrill Dodds, Clare Nally, Jacki Willson, and Robert Allen as one of the more frequently cited texts in burlesque scholarship. With the scope of this study firmly situated in the New York neo-burlesque scene, there is also an opportunity to expand the scope of this book with future work on neo-burlesque in other regions. Within its analysis of camp, humor, and the explicit and unruly body, lie possibilities for scholars interested in feminism, pop culture, cultural studies, and queer theory, as well as future burlesque scholars.
