If you’ve been to Boycott bar in Phoenix, you may already be aware that burlesque is back! But, why is it having a resurgence in this particular moment? What’s the history of burlesque as a political art form?
Kay Siebler is an English professor at the University of Omaha in Nebraska. She’s been following burlesque performance, and wrote a paper back in 2013 about neo-burlesque, and how some performers are subverting the genre.
Lexi Locket has been performing burlesque in Phoenix for a decade. Now, every month at Boycott Bar in Phoenix, she and a group of performers put on a show they call Hump Day Burlesque. They’ve been doing it since 2015 – minus a Covid break. But, it’s not your average burlesque show.
Every week, there’s a theme, Halloween is a big one. They started the year with a Tarot-card themed show this year, and July 3rd’s show was themed “art as activism.” But, they do what’s often called neo-burlesque, a subversive, counter-cultural approach to the craft. They’re a diverse group and they perform in a queer space, Boycott Bar is one of the last Lesbian bars left in the country.
Turns out, they’re part of a long history of burlesque performers who have worked against the dominant culture of the day. Siebler and Locket joined The Show to discuss.
A warning, this conversation may not be appropriate for all listeners.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Lexi Locket has been performing burlesque in Phoenix for a decade.
LEXI LOCKET: When I started burlesque, I had just experienced a major loss. I was 23 when I started burlesque and despite being a young, hot 23-year-old, I did not feel like it. And so I was really trying to reclaim that and remind myself of, like I am youthful and people are attracted to me and all of these things.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. So there was like, like an identity piece and ownership to you?
LOCKET: Totally.
GILGER: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Now, every month at Boycott Bar in Phoenix, she and a group of performers put on a show, they call Hump Day Burlesque. They've been doing it since 2015, minus a COVID break. But it's not your average burlesque show.
LOCKET: I think the goal is always to be able to give people a positive experience and like, sometimes that might be challenging what you find attractive or what you are intrigued by. And I feel like it can definitely be a delicate line to walk, but no one's ever said anything directly.
GILGER: I mean, but it sounds like you want to walk that line a little bit. Give us an example. Like, what are some of the things on stage that people might see, that'd people would be like, ‘oh, that's not what I expected’?
LOCKET: I mean, anytime someone brings out a staple gun.
GILGER: What? Whoa, explain that one.
LOCKET: Yeah, people will do various acts like exploring religious trauma, or my best friend who is one of the original performers and producers of Hump Day, Jacqueline Hyde travels year round and has done an act. This was not on Hump Day stage, but they live in North Carolina two months of the year, and there was some legislation that was happening that, I think it was women's rights, and so they printed it out and was like stapling it into their body.
GILGER: Whoa, wow.
LOCKET: Because you know, art.
GILGER: Yes, but oww. That would hurt.
Every week, there's a theme. Halloween is a big one. They started the year with a tarot card theme show and July 3rd show was themed “art as activism”, but they do what's often called neo-burlesque, a subversive counter-cultural approach to the craft. They're a diverse group and they perform in a queer space. Boycott Bar is one of the last lesbian bars left in the country.
LOCKET: In our society, so much power comes from beauty and from what we find attractive. And so, anytime we can challenge someone to expand what they include in that is really cool, because my perspective from little 23 year old Lexi Lockett, it was just like, “wow, this is so cool” to now has been so broadened and so widened. And anytime you see someone on that stage just claiming their power and their confidence in whatever way it is being embodied in that moment is so cool.
GILGER: Turns out they're part of a long history of burlesque performers who have worked against the dominant culture of the day. Kay Siebler is an English professor and gender studies scholar at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and 10 years ago, she wrote a paper about neo-burlesque. It seemed irrelevant at the time, but she told me burlesque just keeps coming back from Lady Marmalade to what's happening today. But it all started as far back as the 1860s, and a warning, this conversation may not be appropriate for all listeners.
KAY SIEBLER: So, you think about the United States in the 1860s and the women's rights movement, voting rights, property rights, divorce laws, all of those things are happening alongside abolitionist movements and the right to vote and all those things. That's when burlesque emerged.
And in fact, Burle, the Italian root of that word is actually parody, satire, humor. And when it first emerged on the scene, it was a part of vaudeville routines, you think about pre movie houses, the only entertainment that a lot of areas of the country had access to were these vaudeville touring groups. A lot of them were owned by women and, and black women were able to have a livelihood that way, you know, depending on where they were traveling.
But it was a very empowering thing that, that these women, these troops of women did and yes, they were dancing and yes, a lot of times they were subverting sort of the victorian ideology of what it meant to be sexy and a woman, but it was edgy and there was always an element of skit, satire, parody, humor. It was considered very political.
GILGER: So it's about sexuality, but it's also about femininity and what that means?
SIEBLER: You know, and even more than sexuality, and I would say it is the opposite of femininity. It is, it is subverting everything that we are told is femininity in the patriarchy because the patriarchy defines femininity. Women don't get to define femininity. The patriarchal culture defines femininity as an act of keeping women passive and disempowered. Because, if you think of any feminine trait, it is typically one that does not garner cultural power. Be quiet, be passive, be ladylike, you know that laden term of ladylike. And so, the roots of burlesque were really more about defying femininity and reclaiming a power of what it meant to be woman, what it meant to be a performing woman, outside of the constriction of the patriarchy at the moment.
GILGER: So, let me ask you about neo-burlesque and what makes it different? What makes it new?
SIEBLER: So, neo-burlesque is a term that is used by a lot of people simply to mean this new iteration of burlesque. But in fact, I would argue that neo-burlesque needs to have that feminist sort of subtext and the feminist sort of commentary regarding female sexuality. Otherwise, it's just burlesque, in a very traditional, not in the way that I've just described burlesque and the history of burlesque, but in the traditional sense of burlesque as titillation for the male audience.
And in fact, neo-burlesque reclaims that and says, guess what the audience is not male or if it is male, I want to bring you to the point of you, like intrigued and titillated in a very sort of traditional patriarchal version of feminine sexuality. And then, at that very moment, I am going to disrupt it and I'm going to make you uncomfortable and I'm going to insert into this performance, a commentary about what it means to be a woman in the patriarchy, and what female sexuality means in the context of the patriarchy.
Can we even imagine or understand what female sexuality would be outside of a patriarchal construct? Or is everything that we know about how we experience sexuality as, as females fed to us by the patriarchy for the end result of male sexual gratification?
GILGER: So, what does that look like? What's an example?
SIEBLER: Right. So, there's so many interesting things that go on in neo-burlesque. Neo-burlesque really started in, I want to say the 1990s and it was very queer, it was very New York and it was very punk.
So the Velvet Hammer was a burlesque troop, a neo-burlesque troupe in New York City during the 1990s, mid 1990s. And they were punk women. And if you know anything about the history of punk, punk was very much a queer, feminist music movement. At that period of time, again, reclaiming music of the power of women, reclaiming music. And they, the Velvet Hammer, started these burlesque shows where it was very much calling on a vision of female sexuality that was drawing on punk, so very powerful, very, I don't want to say like loud, but loud in every version and that you can think about that, and rejecting all these patriarchal norms of passive vessel, of female sexuality.
But fast forward, it's very queer, it's very much feminist. So, I saw a burlesque performance where someone was doing the typical burlesque and underneath was black sharpie sort of defining her body into like slabs of meat. I’ve seen neo-burlesque where a woman came out in a this lovely sort of foofy bride outfit, right? And she's taking off her bride outfit while Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E is, you know, she's dancing to that, right?
So again, you're getting to the point where you're making a commentary about what it means to be a sexual woman and what that means within, just the culture that is the patriarchy, calling people to think about that.
GILGER: Does this also have to do with, with inclusion like with, with women of color, with queer bodies, with fat bodies? Right?
SIEBLER: Yes. So, going back again to that history and we're talking about Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, women, black women who were on that vaudeville circuit. Many of them lesbians, many of them women loving women, saying ‘we're playing with this sexuality, we're throwing it in your face, this is not, this is our sexuality’.
And so fast forward to neo burlesque today. Larger bodies, black and brown bodies, not the sort of Dita Von Teese, who's so white, she looks like she's alabaster, you know, doing her burlesque dance in the martini glass.
GILGER: Let me ask you, Kay, I mean, so what do you think is happening in our culture right now that might be bringing back burlesque in this way that it ebbs and flows? You know, you wrote this paper 10 years ago, and it was kind of a big thing then, we're seeing it here now. Like what do you think is happening that sparks this again?
SIEBLER: We see these moments of those outside, those traditionally outside the systems of power going ‘No, we've had enough, we're pushing back against this because what we're looking at is a landscape in which all we have is stuff that we're losing’.
