Aims for this blog

By writing this I hope to dump the mash of striptease and burlesque information that I have stewing in my head.  My task is to reveal to myself and to others the complexities of a historiography of boylesque.  And forgive my spelling mistakes, sometimes, my fingers move faster than my head, please use this excuse for grammar and anything else.  I wish to construct a historiography as the first part of my thesis as I have noticed gaps in the literature between  US performance studies and social researchers and the UK from 2005.  Furthermore there has been a rise in masculinities works alongside a recent surge male burlesquers yet no material exists examining these burlesque males., from the UK or US in depth.

I realise I will need to briefly detail the historical changes burlesque researchers and the researcher of sexual history have gone through, waves of differing feminist theorist’s perspectives of female sexual exhibitions from burlesques US inception.   Modernist to post-modernists application of sexual performance.  I will also need to highlight the rise, from the 1990s,  of  performance  studies as a viable social studies research method  alongside the rise of major critical discourses in Masculinities studies.

Problems I know I will encounter will  be the credibility of the authors, whilst I will need to carefully navigate my own personal politics.  I will need to acknowledge that no one group of facts make an intelligible structure and I will need to problematise the relationship between theory and practice.

My narrative will be constructed of key writings on striptease, stripping and burlesque as well as interviews with British, American and Australian boylesquers.  Throughout this I will need to draw upon feminist, gender and masculinity works.  Though the direction and form of this narrative is still beyond my comprehension.  This I know I dearly want to find, and although I know my writing will need to be analytical, my art form, striptease, is playful.  Through its reveals it both conceals and reveals and I wish my writing to follow suit.  Is this possible for a PhD?  I do not know.

Meanwhile, this weekend I will be choreographing the new mouse act.  I have decided  to make this one my strongest political and sexual act to date.  This will test the limits and boundaries between the comedic and the social taboo and the stripper and striptease.  I will also need to figure into this act some new speaking sections.  Experimentation with the speaking stripper is exciting me at the moment as I follow the path of Gypsy Rose Lee.

Tags: Burlesque Links, masculinities studies, Striptease