Is burlesque truly transgressive?

So I've recently finished reading Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture by Robert C. Allen. It has kind of given me a new way of thinking about burlesque, in a historical context, and wondering about it's relevance today as an art form. When Lydia Thompson came to America with her British Blondes in 1869, and basically exploded on the theater scene of the time, the mere fact that women were on stage and saying anything, especially jokes and puns of a less than pure nature, was truly astounding and shocking to audiences back then. It was truly ground breaking. Allen likes to use the terms transgressive and inversive. You had best read his book to get the proper definitions and application of the terms in this instance. But, to say the least, this was shaking people up all over the place and it perceived to a serious threat to the bourgeois culture of the day. Burlesque of this nature lasted until about 1890 until the cooch dance became popular, and performers progressively lost their "voice".

... the silencing of the sexually expressive woman is burlesque in the 1890s, then, had double significance. The burlesque performer had become objectified both in the sense of becoming an object of male scopic pleasure and in the sense of being removed from the stage as a speaking, ordinating subject. Even if the punning rhymes, slangy exclamations, and impersonations of masculine discourse did not derive from the pen of Lydia Thompson and her sisters in the 1860s, the power of burlesque language to call attention to society's categories and hierarchies was based on the fact that it became the only part of her body that did not move in the cooch dance, the shimmy, and the striptease, she literally and figuratively lost her voice. To be sure she still had her body with its power to enthrall, captivate, and, to some extent, dominate her male partner in burlesque's scopic pax de deux. But without a voice it was all the more difficult for that body to reclaim its subjectivity.

But today, most performers wouldn't recognize the burlesque before 1890, because it didn't have any striptease, and really only idolize the muted beauties from 1930 to the 50s. Just about the only perform from that time that sort of breaks the mold is Gypsy Rose Lee.

You might ask about Mae West. Allen does mention Mae West quite a bit, but he doesn't put her in burlesque:

The vaudeville and Broadway career of Mae West provides an example of a sexually expressive female performer whose image and persona initially were not constructed in terms of the grotesque and who dared to step out of the shadows and into the spotlight of bourgeois culture.

She started performing when she was six and by 1912 had her first vaudeville act. But she was never accepted into "big-time" vaudeville because of her bawdy character. She finally bypassed vaudeville by going to Broadway, and finally movies. But when she made it to movies, she's was just shadow of herself. Hollywood would just censor itself, so they couldn't handle West in her full glory.

Now, sure, today's performer of burlesque can, and do, tackle some controversial subjects, but we still normally do it without a voice. Granted adding a voice might require a little more talent, either by singing, or improvisation, or writing the words in the first place. But is the Pussy Cat Dolls really transgressive? Is there anything more than just sexual entertainment in their performance? Should burlesque be anything more than just sexual entertainment? As burlesque gets more popular, I fear it will be nothing but. There will be the attempt to adhere closer to cultural norms so as maximize the buck. So you'll just see more Pussy Cat Dolls.

Allen in the conclusion of his book defines a classification for neo-burlesque when he addresses stripping, Jell-O wrestling and carnival performers. "The tightly knit and self-contained world of carnival performers, who are frequently ostracized by straight society, encourages a reordination of social relations, whereby everyone outside of 'the life' is constructed as an object of contempt." He continues:

Such 'internal' reordination does not subvert the system; it merely reorders its terms for some of its actors. It is more negotiation than resistance: making the system work perversely -- not so much against its own interests as unintentionally in addition to them.

And, I think neo-burlesque suffers from this to some degree, because it is such a close knit community, it's a sub-genre. It isn't like 1869 when it was being introduced as a big new thing and taking over popular theater. Burlesque today has never been that popular and probably never will be. Or if it does, it may just become co-opted by the system for it's own purposes, and lose it teeth, much like it did in the 1890s and later.

One possible exception to this here in NYC is Pinchbottom, they combine theater with burlesque and provide something more than just a standard variety burlesque show. If they managed to become more popular they could potentially be trangressive. There might be similar examples around the country, but I'm not familiar with too much outside of NYC.

Now the one big thing that is transgressive is gender queer movement, which seems to be taking place more and more and is really kind of bigger than burlesque. But a lot of burlesque performers, like to fuck with gender, to a degree, and this actually does have some semblance of what was going on back in 1869. Because the women would dress as men. Now we've progressed more than that now and it's gender is more fluid. So you pull in more influences from gay and drag culture, or borrow good from what ever want to and come up with something that is a bit monstrous, in a manner of speaking. Whether this ever really reaches a mainstream of performance under the name of burlesque, I don't know.

Anyway, Allen is going to be up at BurlyCon, it will be interesting what he has to say on the subject. His book was published in 1991, before neo-burlesque had even started, or was just in it's infancy.