Disrobing the text: Burlesque as l’écriture féminine

Backstage

(The audience begins to come in and take their seats. Some of them are familiar to the world of burlesque and for others, this is their first show. An air of excitement begins to build within the room).

This article traces the connective threads between the performing art of burlesque and l’écriture féminine, a form of writing which was first proposed by the French philosopher Hélène Cixous in her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975; translated into English in 1976). L'écriture féminine – women's writing – is a radical theory which argues for a conscious return towards the woman's body, an embrace of her corporeal and conceptual force as woman and thus a movement away from masculine dominated forms of knowledge and communication. Burlesque is a storied performing art which might, but not always, wed elements of dance and Bakhtinian parody with the deliberate, wry and often provocative disrobing of the performer, resulting in a performance that seeks to unsettle and provoke the audience as much as it simultaneously works to titillate and tease.

I suggest in this article that both burlesque and l’écriture féminine share common concerns about the gendered body in public life, the body as spectacle, the communicative position of woman as woman and the performance of identity. I use these commonalities to argue for the burlesque performer, their performance and their costume as a form of l’écriture féminine in practice. A key part of my discussion centres on the career of the early–mid-20th-century burlesque artist Carrie Finnell (1899–1963). Finnell, an American performer with an international career, was noted for many achievements, including her ‘thoracic muscle control’, and once had her ‘legs and voice’ insured for US$100,000 during the 1920s ¹ (Cincinnati Enquirer, 1963: 2). I suggest that Finnell and her contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic practise l’écriture féminine to both reclaim the female body and to navigate the often paradoxical, contradictory and even hostile debates about its materiality. In doing so, I offer new readings about the body in performance and the female body as spectacle.

This article understands gender as a constructed, performed act. It draws upon the work of Judith Butler (1990: 177, emphasis in original) by understanding gender as ‘a corporeal style, an “act”, as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’. Not only does this have a notable relevance for a performing art in which gender identities are enacted and dissected on a regular basis through the very act of performance, it also directly connects to the idea of l’écriture féminine which, despite its leanings towards biological essentialism, nevertheless makes the emphatic point that the positionality of writing ‘as a woman’ can be practised by those who identify with other genders. I follow such a lead herein and show how the conscious physicality of performers such as Finnell, their costuming and indeed the art of their performance moves away from such essentialism and instead positions burlesque as an act of gendered resistance and of bodily reclamation, whether performed under the hegemonies of the mid-20th-century American entertainment industry or the contemporary stage of a British nightclub. ²

Five minutes to curtain

(The performer finds a quiet space backstage. She makes the final adjustments to her costume and checks her props. She takes a final moment to study herself in the mirror).

Cixous's idea of l’écriture feminine should be understood as an act of insurgency against the academic establishment, written only a handful of years after widespread student riots in Paris and the founding of a new French university designed as a non-hierarchical alternative to more established spaces of higher education. It is a ‘volcanic’ piece of work (Cixous, 1976: 880), in which Cixous rebels against phallogocentric ways of thinking which had historically privileged masculine ways of understanding and proposes an alternative: woman should write woman and, in doing so, defy their theoretical marginalisation by such structures. ³ Women's bodies were not made to be categorised and reduced by an external male-authored force; they should, instead, make their own categories and refuse the circumscriptions which have been placed around them. In returning to her body and embracing the radical, disruptive and transformational potential of it, woman can then frame a new way of writing and of being. She must write ‘her self’ (Cixous, 1976: 880) and thus right, or indeed write, the wrongs which have long since silenced her own unique positionality within the world.

In returning to the female body, and in doing so with deliberate pleasure and joy, l’écriture féminine offered women a way to reclaim their own materiality in a phallogocentric system which had often sought to claim such for its own purposes, if indeed claim it at all. This discourse about the woman came with its own contradictions and hostilities and often sought to deliberately silence the individual herself in the process. L’écriture féminine suggests that even if a woman's voice was othered by structures beyond her ken, the physical resonance of her womanhood could not be silenced. It offers her a route map and the tools for woman to move from the ‘authority’ of the ‘signified’ (Cixous, 1976: 882) into something shaped and created by herself, something new, something wild: ‘Break out of the circles; don’t remain within the psychoanalytic closure. Take a look around, then cut through!’ (Cixous, 1976: 880). In many senses, this highlights a central concern of l’écriture feminine and indeed of burlesque itself: that something can be found, discovered, through active, agentic movement of the self and the defiance of externally applied circumscriptions.

Yet as much as l’écriture féminine proposes new ways of thinking, it also has to reckon with its own inconsistencies. One of the most pressing of these is its explicit inability to be defined; as Cixous (1976: 883) acknowledges: ‘It is impossible to define a feminine piece of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorised, enclosed, coded – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist’. In drawing attention, then, to this apparent contradiction, she reminds us that the inconsistency, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan (1964), is the message. Feminine writing exists, and has always done so, even if the critical spotlight had been unable or unwilling to rest upon it. The established rhetoric of the Western establishment with its predilections towards logocentrism has no way of recognising woman writing as woman, let alone of understanding it when it happens – and happen it does. A further inconsistency of l’écriture féminine centres upon its ideas about gender. Cixous (1976: 877) writes ‘I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man’, and yet despite this leaning towards biological essentialism she notes that many writers of both genders already practice l’écriture féminine. She picks out poets as a key example, noting that ‘the poets – not the novelists, allies of representationalism. Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious […] is the place where the repressed manage to survive’ (Cixous, 1976: 879–880). L’écriture feminine, then, is an opportunity for those who are marginalised and othered, whatever gender they might perform, to take control of their narrative and to present it as their own.

Femininity, for Cixous, is a positionality which can be claimed by those who wish to do so rather than those who fulfil a specific physical criterion or set of requirements. Cixous (1976: 891) emphasises that this apparent contradiction is wholly intentional: ‘Decide for yourself on your position in the arena of contradictions, where pleasure and reality embrace. Bring the other to life’. It is clear that l’écriture féminine is designed to exist somewhere beyond gender identity and physical characteristics; what matters, instead, is the recognition of the ‘enormity of the repression that has kept [you] in the dark’ (Cixous, 1976: 876) and the associated effort to reclaim that which has been taken: ‘your body is yours, take it!’ (Cixous, 1976: 876). In returning to the body, then, and positioning it firmly within the light of public and personal attention, l’écriture féminine is intimately intertwined with notions of desire and sexuality. Cixous asks woman to confront the ‘funny desire sitting inside her’ (Cixous, 1976: 876) and to embrace the seismic charge of her own sensuality. In doing so, woman can defy the ‘logic of antilove’ (Cixous, 1976: 878) about themselves and in doing so ‘liberate the New Woman from the Old’ (Cixous, 1976: 878). This desire for something new, for one's own personal pleasure and sexual gratification, is no ‘shameful sickness’ (Cixous, 1976: 876) but rather an opportunity to define oneself on one's own terms. It is also an opportunity for the then established rhetoric of European Second Wave feminism to find something new, to hint at the queering yet to come.

No longer is woman trapped within a system which does not understand her and which seeks to ‘reduce [her] generative powers’ (Cixous, 1976: 892); she can be, instead, ‘everywhere!’ (Cixous, 1976: 878): Cixous also introduces the verb voler (Cixous, 1976: 887) to characterise woman's ‘movement’ (Cixous, 1976: 878) from the ‘dark’ (Cixous, 1976: 876) to the light. Voler, namely to fly or to steal, as Cixous writes, is an idea that women are more than familiar with: ‘centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers’ (Cixous, 1976: 887). L’écriture féminine offers the tools to both exploit and capitalise upon this strength; it is a way for women to practise ‘flying in language’ whilst simultaneously ‘making it fly’ (Cixous, 1976: 887). It offers the ‘possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’ (Cixous, 1976: 877). This is a toolbox for woman to claim the spotlight and to at last stand central upon her stage.

Act one

(The house lights dim; the audience falls silent. The music begins. The performer steps forward and into the spotlight).

Burlesque is a performing art which makes itself known in many forms. For the purposes of this article, positioned within an Anglophone context as it is, it is best understood as a performer who disrobes on stage, often, although not always, accompanied by an audio accompaniment, with the acknowledgement that this definition does not come near towards encapsulating the clever, witty and often emotional performances which form part of the average burlesque show. Performers may, for example, practise boy-lesque, namely a form of burlesque performed by male-identifying bodies, or nerd-lesque, performances which use deliberate pop culture references such as characters or props from established media franchises. Contemporary performers of burlesque, particularly those from the Global North or possessing the civil autonomies to allow such performances, might often consider themselves as practitioners of neo-burlesque, a wry and knowing 21st-century form of burlesque which tips a postmodern wink to the context and content of its performance whilst also drawing inspiration from the history of the art form.

A key element of burlesque is the audience: they are often encouraged to interact and support the performance either through consensual participation on stage, actively sought by the performer or the event host, or as viewers of the performed spectacle at a distance. The experience of being an audience member at a burlesque event can be profoundly impactful and often challenging experience, particularly for those unfamiliar with the nature of burlesque itself. As Jacki Willson (2008: 1) rightly notes, burlesque can be ‘empowering, disempowering, overpowering’ to witness in person. It requires the audience member not only to reconcile themselves with the actions of the performer on stage but also to then place that performance in wider discussions about ‘legitimacy and illegitimacy, danger and safety, pleasure and anger, liberation and vulnerability’ (Willson, 2008: 2). It is important to note that such debates may be hyperlocal, in which the audience member must, for example, reconcile the liberty of the performer on stage with their own personal circumstances, or hyperglobal, for example in how the burlesque performer and their performance contributes to or questions international discussions about womanhood. The liberty of burlesque may be present, vital, but it is also so often confined to the performer and within the moment of their performance.

Witnessing the body as spectacle, then, requires engagement with a complex and tussling site of meanings; the disrobing body even more so. Willson (2008: 2) writes, for example, about how audiences must negotiate between their feelings of pleasure and anger upon witnessing a burlesque performance: is it empowering to witness women disrobing upon their own terms, in spaces which actively seek to celebrate and promote bodily diversity, or is burlesque instead a sequin-bedazzled capitulation towards the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975)? The questions continue: is the burlesque performer the ultimate feminist act, built upon waves of feminist thinking, or are they an act of retrospective erasure, that which wipes the shore clean? Perhaps it is more productive to instead turn away from such binaries, to allow the questions to remain unanswered and instead to find interest in the complexities and problems which surround burlesque. Indeed, as Cixous (1976: 876) might phrase it, the burlesque performer is somebody who ‘makes trouble’, and it is precisely through their conscious, considered and troublesome complexities that the threads between this legacied performing art and l’écriture feminine begin to intertwine.

Yet this is no new warp, no new weft. Burlesque is a performing art with a rich history and lengthy experience of telling its own story in its own way. Furthermore, the past in burlesque is present, re-enacted through tribute events and celebrations. A key example of this can be found in the Burlesque Hall of Fame, ⁴ an organisation based in the United States, and their yearly celebration of feted performers – known as ‘legends’. These public showcases of burlesque and its history saw older and since-retired performers perform their own iconic routines while also watching the performances of current burlesque artists, many of whom would introduce a form of direct tribute to the legends into their own acts. As Mat Fraser (2015), a BBC journalist, found, the performances from this event were often ‘surprisingly, unexpectedly, profoundly poignant’ and raised questions about ‘sexuality, and of beauty’ (Fraser, 2015).

An additional question arises here about the documentation of dance itself, for, as Ellen Goellner and Murphy (1995: 5) write, ‘dance cannot be frozen, held, stilled’ and so any attempt to record it, to document the performer's routine, must discover ‘fresh ways to describe flux’. Yet technological advances have undoubtedly benefitted the world of burlesque, not only in how reporters are able to share the emotional impact of witnessing a performance in person but also in how the performers themselves are able to now upload showreels and performances to media repositories such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Yet these online archives open up new debates of their own, requiring as they do a negotiation between the frank sexuality of burlesque and the often prudish, over-cautious nature of automated content algorithms. This movement from visibility to invisibility and back again, often at the behest of forces beyond the performer's control, sees burlesque inhabit something of a liminal space: both seen and unseen, known and unknown, visible to those who know how to see it.

All of this, to say, is voler.

Burlesque is a flighty, ephemeral phenomenon, settling as it does in its routine for a handful of moments as the performer delivers it upon the stage before then moving off to become something new, something different. As with other forms of dance, something changes infinitesimally each time that a burlesque routine is performed. Perhaps the performer dwells within the moment a heartbeat longer than normal, extending a shoulder shimmy in reaction to the audience's applause, while the environment itself may differ in temperature or acoustics, or change entirely as the performer moves on, or, as Cixous might characterise it, flies from one engagement to the next. As the burlesque performer ‘blazes her trail in the symbolic’ (Cixous, 1976: 888), she makes herself visible and invisible, marking her moments of reclaimed agency and ‘volcanic’ (Cixous, 1976: 888) impact within the memory of the audience and the sensation left behind the curtain call.

Tensions remain, however, in this movement from darkness to light, from the wings to centre stage. One example of this is how the burlesque performer is required to navigate the economics of value and propriety about her actions. Her art form, despite its legacied history and artistic legitimacy, may be understood as something akin to sex work, located far from the acceptable cultural mainstream. There are opportunities to counteract this narrative, of course, through the management of one's own public profile and, indeed, the work of third-party film makers who are interested in burlesque. ⁵ Yet these constant negotiations about the body and its visibility on an ever-changing stage, or indeed on no stage at all, take their toll and result in absences, erasures and friable presence.

This is only underscored when burlesque is positioned under a theoretical perspective and, in doing so, exposes that framework’s limits and absences. For example, if scholars consider burlesque as a performing art akin to dance, then they must reckon with its absence from foundational dance theory; ⁶ if they view burlesque as a mainstream performing art practised by performers such as Dita Von Teese, then they must reckon with it also being understood as transgressive and marginal in the same seductive breath. In either context, scholars must also ultimately reckon with the profound self-sufficiency of burlesque, a performing art which exists in a self-made, wry, witty counter-cultural space, in which it writes its own story, pays tribute to its own practices and effortlessly moves beyond theoretical siloes.

It is at this point in the discussion that Finnell comes to the stage. Finnell began her career as a dancer before turning to the world of burlesque. She is notable for a number of achievements in the art form, such as a performance in which she extended her disrobe over 54 weeks, removing only one item of clothing per week. ⁷ Finnell was also known as the ‘Mammary Manipulator’ due to her ability to move and flex the muscles about her breasts. Extracts of these performances are available online, most notably through the YouTube content creator and cultural historian Fat History (2023), who devotes an episode to Finnell and her career. One clip from this episode is taken from the film Il Mondo di Notte Numero 2 (1961), a sequel to Il Mondo di Notte (1960). Alongside Finnell, billed here as Finnel, Il Mondo di Notte Numero 2 also features the Dior Dancers, a noted adagio dance troupe; and other burlesque performers such as Rita Renoir, a famous and ferociously modern French dancer. ⁸

As the camera drifts into a New Orleans club, it reveals Finnell performing on stage. Recorded only a handful of years prior to her death in 1963, this is a document of an experienced performer at work. She is in the final notes of her number and, after accepting her rightful applause, takes a moment to set up the next. She asks her audience to imagine that they are in ‘Paris, France’ and listening to Edith Piaf. A wry, complicit contract is formed between performer and audience: they are all aware that they are not. Finnell then starts to sing in French and, at a particular point in the number, begins to move her breasts in time with the music. A startled look passes over her face only to be replaced with a little smile to herself when the audience laughs, right on cue. This is a performer in control of her show, despite the masculine architecture of the film about her. She is in charge, able to claim the viewer's attention, able to voler. Indeed, even when the camera moves onto the next act, it remains caught for a moment longer upon Finnell than it should, as if unable to fully look away, as if pulling on a yet-to-be-broken thread.

Finnell's lengthy career documents both the vaudevillian origins of burlesque within North America and the increasing tension about the female body as public spectacle. Although she and Renoir share a billing in Il Mondo di Notte Numero 2 and indeed can both be understood as burlesque artists, they are very different performers. Finnell's burlesque rests in cabaret and show and indeed, a distinction between audience and performer; Renoir's burlesque works to collapse power hierarchies by using her body as a canvas for questions about feminine identity in a modern world. Yet a commonality exists: both performers rail against the tensions about the female body as public spectacle and how it ought to behave. Finnell, for example, is a fat, robust presence upon the stage who claims her presence with fierce determination and refuses to be diminished by external, phallogocentric and, indeed, often fetishistic mandates about bodily size and propriety. She wields her body as a locus of power – emotional, sexual, funny – and in doing so ‘breaks out of the circles’ (Cixous, 1976: 882) which have been drawn about her.

Both Finnell and Renoir are, as Cixous (1976: 878) might characterise it, ‘the very possibility of change’. They are unafraid of putting themselves ‘into the text […] by [their] own movement’ (Cixous, 1976: 875) and, in doing so, remind the audience of the ‘infinite richness’ of communicating as woman (Cixous, 1976: 876). They are uncontainable, they perform with intent, they subvert, confound, tease. This is burlesque which is written in ‘white ink’ (Cixous, 1976: 881).White ink is akin to ‘mother's milk’ (Cixous, 1976: 881); it rejects the black ink of the established order, an order which has served to erase women and their identity within the world, and offers instead something fluid, productive and markedly feminine. If a text is written in white ink, with all its implicit connections towards female biology, in the wry twitch of Finnell's breasts it looks towards the potential of the future while simultaneously revelling in its bodily present. In writing their story in ‘white ink’, and reminding the audience of the biological strengths of the author behind the text, Finnell and Renoir and all of their contemporaries centre womanhood upon the stage. They bring the ‘breath of the whole woman’ (Cixous, 1976: 880) and all that which makes her into the performance.

Interval

(The house lights rise. The audience begins to talk amongst themselves. Backstage, a performer takes out a needle and thread and begins to carefully sew up a small tear on their corset).

While this article has so far traced the entanglements between burlesque and l’écriture féminine, voler and the burlesque performer, it is productive to note that there are other similar intersections between page and stage. Perhaps the most pronounced of these intersections is choreographic notation, a method of documenting choreographic movement through codified systems such as Labanotation and Benesh dance notation. The former, as originated by Rudolf Laban and documented in practical guidebooks elsewhere (such as McCaw, 2011), records the movement and actions of a body within a particular space. It aims to recognise the tonality of a performer's action as much as the physicality of the action itself and plots the movement across a series of axes. It also asks us to read it from the bottom up, and in many senses, to enact the documented movement as they do so. In contrast, Benesh Notation, invented by the wife-and-husband team of Joan and Rudolf Benesh, and intimately linked with the world of classical ballet, works on a horizontal axis similar to a music stave. It offers a figurative documentation of the dancer's movement, made from the perspective of somebody behind the performer, as if they are sitting backstage. Notably, it also offers information above and below the stave, such as the relationship between the performers or the nature of a movement at a particular time, to give further texture to the notation itself.

Both systems allow a way for choreographed performance to become documented and recorded for performers to then re-enact in the future. So far, so text. Yet this article does not seek to recognise these systems as acts of l’écriture féminine but rather as something which exists alongside it, something similar and yet quite different. Choreographic notation works to capture the volcanic resonance of movement on the stage, but they are acts of writing carried out by somebody other to the performer themselves. These are codified systems of black ink, to use Cixous’ phrasing, which seek to trap movement through the eye of a third party, to document its specificity so it can be then re-enacted in a specific form in the future. Rather than focusing on this third-party form of text, this article argues instead for the performer themselves as point of interest, and in tracing the entanglements between that performer and l’écriture féminine, it argues for how the performer can put ‘herself into the text […] by her own movement’ (Cixous, 1976: 875), how she can write her own story.

Act two

(The house lights dim; the audience leans forward expectantly. A performer steps on stage. She runs one finger teasingly up the side of her rhinestone-encrusted corset).

In this second act, I shift focus to consider the costuming of the performer, and in particular the role of the corset. Corsets are a well-established form of clothing throughout history and something which the female body has both been bound within and escaped from depending on the shifting ideas about the female body throughout history (Erkal, 2017). A corset can come in many different forms: it may be under-bust, namely supporting the torso beneath the breasts, or over-bust, extending over the breasts themselves to the extent that the corset may be worn instead of a bra, and can made out of a variety of material such as coutil or leather. A commonality between corsets is the notion of boning, that is to say structural elements sewn within the material which provide both shape and support upon the garment being worn on the body. Historically, this boning might have been whalebone but it is now more often steel, either flat or spiral, or some other form of synthetic alternative. While corsets may be used for aesthetic or medical purposes, they might also form part of a tightlacing programme, a practice popular in alternative and fetish communities, in which the individual wears their corset increasingly tightly in order to modify their bodily measurements on a temporary or long-term basis.

Corsets are an established and vital part of the visual language of burlesque (Scott, 2019), with performers such as Dita Von Teese making them an important and leading part of their aesthetic (McKnight, 2020). Yet in its embrace of the corset, burlesque laces itself within paradox, within questions. Corsets bind and shape the body held within but also hide it from public view. They are a barrier to the tease, to the promise of nudity, and yet also a spotlight upon the body. In giving their wearer an hourglass silhouette, in bringing the unruly body into shapes typical and expected, they can easily be read as a tool of the phallogocentric society and of bodily orthodoxies. The female body in public must conform; the corset makes it so. If worn over the top of clothing, a tip often recommended for corset wearers to protect their skin from the impact of the garment, the corset becomes another barrier to the tease, to the promise of nudity.

In drawing attention to the body, then, in creating curves between breast and hip, while simultaneously effacing its object of attention, the corset generates debates about visibility. The performer, and indeed the audience, must reckon with the reading of the body not only prior to the corset being worn but also within the garment's encasement and within its profound and marked shaping. Corsets force a conscious return to the body; the burlesque performer, as with everything in this contradictory, challenging performing art, wears her corset with intent. She evokes the showgirl aesthetic and an hourglass silhouette, but also seeks to question and find parody within them. She unlaces her corset and shows the audience the unadorned physicality behind it, and in doing so asks her audience to accept the truth of the body without artifice. The corset is no imposed tool here but rather an act of reclamation; one which questions ideas about sexuality and the representation of the public body while simultaneously returning control towards the performer themselves.

In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous (1976: 885) notes that woman is a site of ‘infinite and mobile complexity’ and the host of ‘a thousand and one thresholds’. The corset provides a literal manifestation of these thresholds through its material barriers about the body but also in how the performer deliberately laces and unlaces it upon her wont. Not only does the corset reveal, it hides. It confines, it removes. The performer may cover themselves back up, reverse the convention of the tease, and in doing so call out the expectation for nudity and, indeed, the audience's demand for such. Burlesque is burlesque, with or without the tease, and the corset provides the emphatic punctuation throughout. Indeed, in burlesque, the performer becomes the ‘true “mistress” of the Signifier’ (Cixous, 1976: 886). They have repurposed the complex legacy of the corset, and in doing so reclaimed their once ‘yield[ed] body’ (Cixous, 1976: 885) as their own. Thus the body as spectacle, its daring physicality, its unruly sexuality, moves from darkness to light and back again, and does so, finally, under the authorship of the performer themselves. Voici, voler.

Curtain call

(The performers take a bow; the audience cheers. The house lights rise. The performance is over but an echo, a resonance of it, remains).

The body of the performer, particularly of those who sit in the liminal, twilight world of burlesque and its night-time economy, is a site of conflict, debate. These debates will not end and may, indeed, often seek to appropriate the body of the performer themselves for their own ideological and political purposes. In arguing for burlesque as l’écriture féminine, I offer a new way to understand the performing body, the body as spectacle, and indeed the legacied relationship between body and text. As Ellen W Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (1995, ix) remind us, ‘learning to read dance as literary critics read texts’ can provoke exciting and new ways of understanding both the physical body on stage and the text upon the page. In tracing the entanglement between l’écriture féminine and burlesque, this article has offered a new route towards understanding the body. It has argued for burlesque as a novel form of l’écriture féminine in practice, and one which embraces, recognises and celebrates the complexities of such. It has traced the idea of voler through reference to the work of Finnell and her peers, before then recognising the curious textuality of the corset in burlesque. It has shown how this often-misunderstood performing art defies expectations; burlesque can be transformative, challenging, radical, provocative. In short, it has argued for burlesque as a living, breathing and dancing 21st-century definition of l’écriture féminine in practice.