Cross-Dressing Striptease Performers
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Richard Bauman suggests that performance be understood,
.. .as a mode of communication, a way of speaking, the essence
of which resides in the assumption of responsibility to an
audience for a display of communicative skill, highlighting the
way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond
its referential content. (Bauman, 1986, p. 3)
Dance, regardless of gender, should be seen as a performance loaded with
communicative units, especially in the proper setting. While most restaurants and
bars or lounges maintain a domestic sense of what tourism theorist Dean MacCannell
calls “front” and “back” region relationships, strip clubs aim to blur or reduce the
appearance of this barrier while, it is true, reinforcing it by slavish reliance on
traditional roles: men give resources to gain access to women. No doubt extra
frisson is introduced by the robust mythology that many of the dancers are, in fact,
men. Certainly, for perfonners involved in this species of display, risk of failure
also goes up.
It is to be understood that two forms of performative events are at play:
the actions of the dancers and the actions of the customers, engaged in discussing
or reconfiguring past performance. The vigor with which the claim of a male-forfemale presence is made by audience members to one another seems to indicate a
strong willingness to support and help perpetuate the theme. There seems to be no
question that a certain number of burlesque and striptease performers are, in fact
as well as in the desire or imagination of the spectators, men in drag.
While the emotional tone established may be called coiintetfeit intimacy,
the performance skill involved is obviously serious and entirely authentic, in the
sense that real conventions are being followed. Conventions of the form virtually
demand high heel shoes (and also rely heavily on such standbys as suspenders,
stockings, and merry widows as well as the particular artifice of the transvestite).
In the case of cross-dressers, a battery of practical, cosmetic presentations
are devised. If some specialists in the field insert big bags of saline in order to gain
enormous purchase on the imagination, drag practitioners use additional folkcommunicated, special-task technology.
During the process of field work for a proposed book (a social history of
striptease in the United States) a recurrent theme emerged which was particularly
curious. The men who spoke about their experiences as audience members were
almost never reluctant to talk — in fact, a second theme to be traced might deal
with the secondary performative nature of these events. The experience allowed
the consumer to acquire fodder for future story telling sessions. For example almost
all these respondents could recall a memory involving their doing too much: