UC Berkeley

“Queer Burlesque’s Histories, Fantasies, and Futures,” interprets queer and disabled burlesque through interviews, ethnographies, and performance analysis, reading history, craft, and choreographies that together reimagine the intersectional possibilities of “queer” away from queer mainstreaming and toward queer and trans liberation. I point to the entanglement of crip drag and racial mimicry and the way burlesque can cite, reclaim, satirize, or exploit the construction of the other. Burlesque as a performance genre evolved from minstrelsy, and many mainstream burlesque performers continue to use black dance without attribution or citation, employ culture as a costume, and use disability as a narrative trope. I interview over twenty international burlesque performers in order to interpret performers’ responses to racial appropriation and disability drag and investigate their pedagogical strategies of education, activism, and the cultivation of desire for justice. I use crip glam as an epistemology for citing the lines of gestural exchange and manipulating traditional models of femininity, where performers invent strategies of refusing objectification and reimagining intimacy.

Chapter 1, “Un-Choreographing Violence: Transformation in Trauma Time,” delves into how burlesque can create cultural shifts toward undoing rape culture through its nondiscursive form of erotic activism. I argue that trauma time is a mode of crip time that enables survivors to experience the world differently and in doing so implement their unique skill set to create transformative performance toward abolishing sexual violence. Chapter 2, “Crip Glam As Eroto-Technoscience: Transforming Devices in the Dancing Sensorium” examines the making of queer and disabled burlesque props. This chapter examines crip glam as a form of crip eroto crip-technoscience, a disabled strategy of reinvention that emerges from the labor of cultivating desire combined with the scientific knowledge disabled people garner from surviving ableist medical systems. Chapter 3, “Anti-capitalist Re-use and Refuse: Wigs, Rhinestones, and Compost,” looks at the hand-making Do-It-Yourself practices of building costumes in queer and disabled burlesque and the relationship between these practices and racialized queer excess, femme disposability, and reclaiming trash as aesthetic. Finally, chapter 4, “Object Choreographies and Gestural Attitudes: A Biography of The Cane,” travels further into the realm of critical prop studies, using the case study of the cane as both prop and medical device to signal the ways that stage objects can reveal buried histories. Together these chapters provide a guide for interpreting queer burlesque that reimagines the intersectional crip erotic possibilities of “queer.”