Revealing Citations: Citational Praxis in Neo-Burlesque Striptease (2025)

This dissertation asks the question: What can looking at neo-burlesque performance as a dialectical form of critical analysis reveal about histories of feminist performance, racialization and care? Neo-burlesque performance draws on, or 'cites,' key aesthetic and affective elements of 20th century burlesque often with the goal of providing social or political commentary. I understand citation in this case to be a process of becoming familiar with a larger body of ideas about the form, and then adding one's own unique input. The burlesque performer who cites past performance must navigate the context of who and what ideas are being cited. To respond to those pasts, they deconstruct (or perhaps, undress) these citations through the lens of their own cultural politics. I unpack these ideas by discussing one neo-burlesque showcase and two performers. In Chapter 1, I look at the tribute acts featured in the Love Letters to the Legends tribute showcase at the 2021 Virtual Burlesque Hall of Fame. The tribute act, an explicitly citational subgenre of neo-burlesque, requires performers to study and respond to the burlesque canon, fostering intergenerational care and preservation. Chapters 2 and 3 explore how performers use dialectical citation to respond to the burlesque canon and broader contemporary cultural contexts: Calamity Chang's acts challenge harmful citationality towards East Asian women and culture, confronting North American audiences with their own consumption and fetishism, and Zyra Lee Vanity iii complicates "glamorous" classic burlesque aesthetics by citing Black expressive cultures, countering stereotypes and drawing from her personal experience growing up in the Black Caribbean diaspora. This dissertation foregrounds how neo-burlesque artists learn with and from one another through the process of research-creation. In a collaborative research process with the very performers who continue to reinvent burlesque performance, this project has co-created a new paradigm for the form that centers citation as a practice of care. In the following dissertation, I argue that the development of knowledge is never accomplished without the contributions of others, and this dissertation is no exception. Completing it would have been impossible without a wide-reaching and invested support network. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Barry Freeman, who provided encouragement, trusted my instincts, provided invaluable provocations, and endless support according to the needs of this project. I also wish to express my gratitude to my committee, Stephen Johnson and T.L. Cowan. Stephen played a pivotal role in supporting this project, offered critical counsel when I most needed it, and made me feel at home and valued at CDTPS throughout both my MA and PhD. T.L.'s guidance, rigour, and attention to ethics and care have been transformative for my writing and thinking process. Thank you to my eternal examiner, Margot Francis, and internal examiner, Jill Carter, for your insights and thoughtful engagement with my work that led to a fruitful and encouraging defense I will remember fondly.

The Untitled Black Burlesque History Project

2017

“Working On and Against” Classic Burlesque Conventions in Zyra Lee Vanity’s Irie Love

Canadian Theatre Review, 2022

‘Classic burlesque’ refers to a style of contemporary burlesque performance that attempts to recreate some of the conventions of mid-century striptease. In this article, I explore the work classic burlesque does to cite, adapt, and preserve elements of historic striptease through its practitioners’ unique relationship with the archive and repertoire of historic burlesque. Though classic burlesque is fraught with much of the cultural baggage of the history it inherits, it creates an embodied act of preservation less concerned with historical authenticity than with preserving an attitude toward striptease that values ‘tease’ and a personal approach over codified technique. Using Zyra Lee Vanity’s Irie Love act as a case study, I offer that many performers choose to navigate the biases of the form because of the creative potential it affords them to challenge dominant histories of burlesque that perpetuate the erasure of marginalized artists. Vanity does so by reanimating the important contributions of marginalized artists in the history of striptease. While exclusionary standards still inform much of the practice, many of the conventions of classic burlesque are mobile and can be an important site of meaning-making for the artists who practice it.

The Politics of Burlesque: A Dialogue Among Dancers

from "Burlesque" (Eds. Shelley Scott and Reid Gilbert). Spec. issue of Canadian Theatre Review 158. Abstract: Everyone’s got something to say about the politics of burlesque. For this slideshow, Adriana Disman wanted to hear from the performers themselves, and she invited dancers from across Canada to write a little about what “the politics of burlesque” mean for them. Some describe socially engaged acts, some talk about the reasons behind their decision to perform, and still others express a dedication to carving out specifically politicized space for themselves within the burlesque scene. While this slideshow strives to represent performers from different burlesque communities, it is important to point out that it is not comprehensive, and more work needs to be done to represent the multiplicity of bodies and identities that appear in this genre (such as Indigenous, trans, and disabled performers).

Laughing It Off: Neo-Burlesque Striptease as a Theatre of Resistance - Reisa Klein (CarletonUniversity, Ottawa, Canada)

This article examines ‘bodily humour’ within the context of neo-burlesque. By analyzing various techniques including the use of parody, exaggeration, costumes and make-up, it considers the ways in which bodily humour operates within counterhegemonic resistances through the use of pleasure, biopower and performances of new subjectivities. Nonetheless, it argues that, neo-burlesque’s continued focus on bodily display and objectification set parameters on the types of resistances that can unfold.

Popular Bodies, Canonical Voices

Modern Drama, 2009

"Burlesque Signs: Theater, Translation, and the Betrayal of Sexism." In Revealing New Perspectives, eds. Kevin Brownlee and Marina S. Brownlee

Peter Lang, 2022

https://www.peterlang.com/document/1241231 My Abstract for this chapter is included in the PDF. This volume of studies in honor of Stephen G. Nichols by colleagues, friends, and students is called Revealing New Perspectives because that is what his career exemplifies. As both the verb and adjective forms suggest, Steve has undeniably changed the course of medieval studies in ways which have had a global impact that continues to be profound. He has always been committed to not only contextualizing the intellectual and artistic production of the past in which a work was created, but to considering it also according to the current theoretical optics of our time, since each age has its own set of aesthetic and cultural realities and expectations. The contributions to this volume by sixteen distinguished medievalists are divided into the five sections of "Visuals," "Lyric," "Philology," "Alterity," and "Rewritings." While it can, of course, be argued that each essay partakes of more than one of these categories, they have been globally organized into the category that predominates in their articulation.

Laughing It Off: Neo-Burlesque Striptease as a Theatre of Resistance

2015

This article examines ‘bodily humour’ within the context of neo-burlesque. By analyzing various techniques including the use of parody, exaggeration, costumes and make-up, it considers the ways in which bodily humour operates within counterhegemonic resistances through the use of pleasure, biopower and performances of new subjectivities. Nonetheless, it argues that, neo-burlesque’s continued focus on bodily display and objectification set parameters on the types of resistances that can unfold.

Queer Embodiment in Burlesque: Disidentifying with the Heteronormative Hegemony

This paper is an investigation of how burlesque performances provide a stage for queer representations and queering of the hegemonic heteronormative representational system, the current dominant paradigm. This queering of gendered normativity is achieved through attempts at de-essentializing identities of gender, sex, sexual preference, and body types as incorporated in the contemporary cultural set up within a binary, hierarchical sex-gender framework of social existence. This paper argues that burlesque aims to realize this objective using a non- confrontational approach of disidentification, a strategy that simultaneously conforms and contradicts the archetypical socio-cultural setup and its resultant ideological structures, to attempt to transform the constructed logic from within the system. Through deconstruction of gendered roles, sexed bodies and heteronormative assumptions, burlesque performances defy the hegemony of a normalizing, if not discriminatory, social existence, arguing for an egalitarian mode of social setup without a utopian fantasy. It argues for inclusion of counter-normative identities through employment of its constitutive elements of humor and tease in the service of a social agenda that goes beyond assimilative or ideological identity politics and offers an alternate model that needs to be assessed for sustainability on a larger scale. Burlesque, as discussed in this paper, provides an alternate methodology to more radical approaches for subjectification of minoritarian counter-normative identities.

THE END OF A TRADITION: HOW THE CLASSICAL TURNED INTO BURLESQUE

2007

"Law in High Heels: Performativity, Alterity, and Aesthetics," Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal Vol. 20 Number 2 (2011): 289-321.

"Pedro Almodóvar‘s High Heels (the original Spanish title, Tacones Lejanos, literally means ―distant heels‖) is a 1991 postmodern film that celebrates performance, fluidity, and fragmentation as ways of being in and understanding the world. In a generic combination of melodrama, comedy, musical, and film noir, High Heels tells the story of a turbulent motherdaughter relationship, and a judge‘s criminal investigation following the murder of the daughter‘s husband (who also happens to be the mother‘s former lover). In recent years, Almodóvar‘s film has received the attention of Orit Kamir, a law-and-film feminist scholar who opens up a refreshing line of inquiry. Kamir uses the film as a powerful site and as a means to explore alternative feminist images of law, judgment, and justice.In this Article, I provide new insights into Kamir‘s feminist jurisprudential reading of the film by placing it within the framework of postmodern jurisprudence, performativity, and queer aesthetics. My aim is to reconceptualize law through an ethics of alterity, and to further theoretical developments in postmodern accounts of judgment, ethics, and justice."