Deploying Delivery as Critical Method: Neo-Burlesque’s Embodied Rhetoric

Abstract

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to material symbolic communication in analyzing rhetoric of the body, focusing primarily on the linguistic or on nonsymbolic materiality. Yet the body communicates via a range of material symbolic practices. Delivery offers an analytical framework for understanding the ways that performing bodies communicate in multiple symbolic codes. Through analysis of neo-burlesque, the essay argues that delivery as a critical method for embodied rhetoric highlights the complex interplay between spaces and bodies and audiences that construct particular genres, providing a wider rhetorical vocabulary to critiques of neo-burlesque and other contested sites of women’s erotic performance.

Notes

¹ Thank you to RR reviewers Debra Hawhee and Lindal Buchanan for their generous and thoughtful feedback. Thank you also to Theresa Enos for your encouragement, to Stacie Joy for your help and beautiful photos, to Legs Malone for the inspiration, to The Burlesque Hall of Fame for access to the achieves, and to Hannah Dickinson for always agreeing to read (yet another) draft.

² Although Bettie Page, a pin-up and fetish model in the 1950s, did not perform burlesque, her looks—in particular dark hair and red lipstick—are popular in neo-burlesque.

³ I use “burlesque” to refer generally to theatrical erotic performance, and I use “neo-burlesque” to refer specifically to the revival of burlesque in the last thirty years.

⁴ The claim that neo-burlesque draws mixed-sex audiences, often dominated by women, is referred to frequently in the literature and in the lore of neo-burlesque (see Mansbridge; Nally; Willson). The actual percentage of women in audiences, however, is “subject to wide variation” (Harris 148).

⁵ My separation of the material from the linguistic is intended to draw attention to the fact that linguistic practices are only one way that bodies communicate symbolically.

⁶ I focus on burlesque in the US because it is where I have conducted my research.

⁷ At the 2013 Follies Fromage on Coney Island, Headmistress of the New York School of Burlesque Jo Weldon shared that she advises students who can’t think of a name to pick their favorite flower and favorite cheese. (I would be Daisy Havarti.)

⁸ Names vary for both strippers and burlesquers. Feature dancers, who travel and headline at different strip clubs, often share qualities with neo-burlesquers, including theatrical names and elaborate acts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maggie M. Werner

Maggie M. Werner is an assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she teaches writing with a focus on rhetorical analysis and style. Her research specialties include embodied rhetoric and erotic performance. Her writing appears in Composition Studies, Feminist Formations, JAC, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, Rhetoric Review, and the edited collection Peace and Social Justice Education on Campus: Faculty and Student Perspectives. She may be contacted at [email protected].