Ashley Dunn – Music Theatre Dance Journal

Ashley Dunn

Ohio State University

The 1920s through 1960s were the alleged Golden Age of burlesque, a period during which male producers became even more reliant on the commodification of women’s bodies through the popularization of striptease acts. These striptease acts largely replaced the parody and comedy acts that had characterized burlesque during its eighteenth-century heyday. During this Golden Age, the names of white burlesque dancers like Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee became fixtures in middle-class households.¹ They embodied the times’ standard of beauty and became models for the sexually liberated woman of the Roaring Twenties and beyond.

While white burlesque dancers gained prominence during the Golden Age, another phenomenon took shape in parallel: Black women who sought higher incomes became increasingly attracted by the financial stability burlesque could afford them. Instead of being categorized straightforwardly as “Black burlesque dancers,” Black women in burlesque were often called “shake dancers,” a term used to describe the kind of dances they performed, including the black bottom, the shimmy, and the shake—later staples in mainstream white striptease acts. While these were mere “dance crazes” for the white public, for the Black community, the black bottom, the shimmy, and the shake were forms of cultural expression birthed out of resilience, rebellion, and the need to affirm communal bonds. Appropriating Black dance forms allowed white burlesque dancers to transgress social limits of sensuality and eroticism by adopting the temporary persona of the hypersexual and hyper-visible Black woman. In doing so, white burlesque dancers were able to subvert and comment on the subjugation they experienced as white women.

Robert Allen’s seminal 1991 study of American burlesque Horrible Prettiness paints a different picture of white burlesque dancers’ appropriation of Black dance forms like the shimmy, as well as their adoption of striptease acts, as acts that figuratively caused the loss of the burlesque performer’s voice. Additionally, Allen posits that burlesque’s “transgressive potential” was truly realized only during its formative years in the 1860s, when parody reigned, not in the striptease acts of its Golden Age. Horrible Prettiness primarily focuses on Lydia Thompson, a white British performer, whom Allen and other scholars credit for introducing burlesque to the United States. In 1868 Thompson introduced to New York audiences her “leg show,” which foregrounded a chorus of women dressed in flesh-colored tights in a parodic performance that countered Victorian ideas of womanhood, dress, and decorum.

Allen’s book speaks importantly to the ways in which burlesque is exploitative and to the dangers of women’s hypervisibility as burlesque performance became increasingly revealing—but his alignment of Black cultural forms with the degradation of burlesque leads him to overlook the ways in which Black dance and Black shake dancers constructively influenced burlesque throughout its history. If burlesque truly is, as Allen argues in Horrible Prettiness, an art form for those in society deemed the “low other” to speak out against their subjugation, scholars of burlesque should not continue to erase shake dancers, who existed on the lowest rung of American society because of their Blackness and gender, from its history. How much of burlesque’s “transgressive potential” is left unrealized when Black women, who sidestep social boundaries by merely existing, are treated as footnotes?

Histories of burlesque by scholars and aficionados alike—such as Michelle Baldwin’s Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind (2004), Jane Briggeman’s Burlesque: A Living History (2009), Leslie Zemeckis’s Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America (2013), and Dusty Sage’s Burlesque in a Nutshell: Girls, Gimmicks, and Gags (2016)—argue consistently that burlesque is an art form that has allowed white women to speak from and transgress the margins, and to combat the oppression of their gender. Seldom, however, do they attend to the ways in which other marginalized women working in burlesque, specifically those marginalized by race, have combatted the oppressions that they have faced.

The concept of fugitivity, instead of transgression, provides one way to correct for this, helping to expose the roots of what is at work in Black burlesque dancers’ performances and to attend to their lived experiences as Black women. Unlike transgression, which is the act of challenging social limits put in place by power regimes, fugitivity is a complete disregard for social limits and the power regimes that enforce them. It not only cuts through the social boundaries that gendered oppression creates, but also circumvents the project of white hegemony. Western culture has tended to perceive Black women as othered and sexually perverse by default. Blackness already exceeds social limits, so transgression is not possible: Black women are already read as disruptive. Therefore, the concept of transgression is inadequate to frame performances of Black burlesque dancers and to undo white scholars’ erasure of their impact and presence in the form.

This erasure can be at least partially undone by situating Black burlesque performers, “shake dancers,” as cultural producers and foremothers of burlesque, who, through acts of fugitivity and resistance, helped to engender burlesque innovation . Central to this conversation is The Creole Show, an all-Black burlesque from the 1890s that was “marketed as the only show of its kind on Earth” due to its subversion of racist caricatures used in minstrel shows of the time, providing evidence of an early Black troupe during the formative years of modern burlesque, when parody still reigned.² Many Black star performers emerged from this revue, including Florence Hines, a Black male impersonator who performed as a dandy figure. Her portrayal and parody of the dandy ran counter to the negative representations of Black men and women that had been common in minstrelsy. Later, shake dancers from burlesque’s Golden Age, such as Tarza “the Exotic” Young and Gertrude “Baby” Banks, adopted fugitive, resistive strategies to delineate themselves from white dancers and reclaim the dances white dancers had appropriated from Black culture. More than just footnotes in history, these Black performers played an integral role in influencing the very direction of American burlesque.

Horrible Prettiness is often cited for its critical analysis of what American burlesque is and what is at work in it. According to Allen, burlesque grants those who have been culturally subordinated the agency to counter and question dominant culture because “it casts down all the gods from their pedestals.”³ Allen employs Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s idea of high/low discourses to discuss how burlesque is ““grounded in the aesthetics of transgression, inversion, and the grotesque. The burlesque performer represents a construction of what Stallybrass and White call the ‘low-other’: something that is reviled by and excluded from the dominant social order as debased, dirty, and unworthy, but that is simultaneously the object of desire and/or fascination.” In Stallybrass and White’s 1986 study The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the dominant social order is just one of four of their “symbolic domains,” or hierarchies. The other three are: psychic forms, the human body, and geographical space. Their book explores the processes by which, in each of these hierarchies, “the low troubles the high”—which is what Allen posits burlesque carries the potential to do. More specifically, speaking to their book’s title, Stallybrass and White explore how agents in each of their domains can transgress established rules and, in turn, the consequences of transgression.⁴

Stallybrass and White’s theory of transgression harkens back to Michel Foucault’s 1963 essay “A Preface to Transgression,” which explores how his subject can be used as a tool for resistance and power, as well as how transgression enables both society and the individual to go beyond the limits of modern human experience. There Foucault engages with George Bataille’s concept of transgression, which locates transgressive acts in prehistoric religious traditions, such as ritualistic sacrifices. For Bataille, ritualistic sacrifices, which he considers the ultimate transgressive act, helped an individual access what was considered sacred. Foucault differs from Bataille in that he does not see transgression as a sacred act, but as one of defiance against power regimes that establish and enforce social limits within a culture. In modern society, then, Foucault believed that the “profanation” of the sacred is a transgressive act.⁵

In Horrible Prettiness Allen historicizes how Lydia Thompson’s “Thompsonian” burlesque “[cast] down all the gods from the pedestals”—referring metaphorically to Victorian attitudes, which relegated women to the domestic sphere and demanded that they be subservient to men and chaste. As a way for Thompson to oppose these strictures, she created a performance style that “was not merely a variation on an established theatrical genre, but something new and troubling in its power to entrance the spectator with displays of women in revealing costumes who were dangerously impertinent in their mocking male impersonations, streetwise language, and nonsensical humor.”⁶ Thompson’s burlesque incorporated male impersonations, widely popular at that time (the 1800s), as a way to mock patriarchal power structures and to counter misogynistic and sexist views that excluded women from the stage and the sphere of normative extradomestic work.

Until the 1920s burlesque was mostly bereft of the kind of striptease acts that largely define it today. As evidenced in Thompson’s performances, however, early burlesque did include some “theatrical display of shapely women in elaborate, revealing costumes” for that time, revealing shoulders, legs, and cleavage. ⁷ Her infamous leg show upended Victorian ideas of womanhood by making lewd jokes that poked fun at nobility. Burlesque for Lydia Thompson became a vehicle to transgress the social limits imposed upon her gender.

Is it possible to imagine how Black women can transgress the limits imposed upon them because of their Blackness? Can Blackness be transgressed? Despite measures like the Emancipation Proclamation and the repeal of Jim Crow laws, systemic, structural racism still prevails, hindering Black equality. White women, too, face misogyny and sexism, but their whiteness affords them privilege unknown to other marginalized women. For instance, the suffragist movement, spanning the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, saw white and Black women fighting alongside one another for American women’s right to vote, yet it ultimately won that right only for white women. White burlesque performers like Thompson could flout social norms and trouble the patriarchy—all while reasserting their whiteness and creating further distance from Blackness. Black burlesque performers enjoyed no such privilege.

Early burlesque acts incorporated blackface minstrelsy, a racist form of “entertainment” designed by white performers to ridicule and demean Black people. When Thompson first made waves in the United States, her troupe attracted the interest of popular minstrel performer M.B. Leavitt. Leavitt subsequently combined the American minstrel show’s traditional three-act format with a Thompsonian leg show, bringing the comedy, music, song, and dance or the former to the latter. Applying the structure and conventions of minstrelsy to burlesque was fitting considering that the word burlesque itself derives from the Italian term burlare, meaning to joke, banter, or play. And Blackface minstrelsy was already, in many ways, a burlesque of Blackness. By incorporating the former’s jokes, gender impersonation, song, and dance, burlesque blurred the distinction between what had been two discrete forms at the turn of the twentieth century. Even so, both were distinctly white spaces, where white men and women confronted a changing American racial landscape.

As burlesque worked to establish itself in predominantly white spaces, and wedded itself to blackface minstrel dramaturgy, the Creole Burlesque Co, an all-Black, New York based burlesque touring company operating from 1890 to 1897 worked to disrupt and challenge such spaces through The Creole Show. The creation of The Creole Show is itself a fugitive act, illustrating Black performers’ desire to evade dehumanizing Black characterizations and conventions typical of the period. Marquise Bey describes fugitivity, building on Fred Moten’s notion of the term, as “marking a kind of outlawish indiscreet disavowal of and disengagement from the project of hegemony.” In his Them Goon Rules (whose very title, a rap lyric by Lil’ Wayne, is an example of disrupting the status quo) Bey explores intersections of Blackness and fugitivity, doing away with standard grammar. Instead, the text speaks from a space “where we [Black people] use vernacular, words that break free of grammar’s lexical dictates: we fix food instead of cook it, cut instead of turn lights on, so they can’t figure out what we talmbout” [sic]. In the book’s introduction, Bey writes, “If [fugitivity] is a political, disruptive act, then here I want to engage that disruption, revel in it, let it flex on ’em with humbled hubris.”⁸

Them Goon Rules reads more like an extended poem than a standard academic text. As such, it is fugitive itself, on the run from the rules created within the ivory tower of academia, which has historically restricted, marginalized, and silenced Black students, faculty, and staff. A fugitive text cannot use the same white hegemonic structures to express itself; it must be, as Bey writes, in the language of “them goons”: “to ‘go by them goon rules’ is a praxis of unruliness in the sense that the deviancy cast upon those who undermine systemic rule is mobilized in service of the deviant.” Blackness and fugitivity are interconnected and are, as Bey states, a deployable, disruptive force that disturbs “normativity and normative whiteness.”⁹ Blackness is a fugitive status, a state of being continuously on the run from captivity—but also, most importantly, Blackness is the condition of being on the run toward freedom. The Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 made criminals of escaped slaves and warranted their capture. Black people in the current day are still held captive by an anti-Black society.

The concept of fugitivity finds Black people existing in a liminal space between freedom and capture—by the grasp of systemic racism, in particular. In this space, Black people are not considered human and do not fit neatly into gender categories. As Black feminist scholars like Hortense Spillers and Marquis Bey have theorized, however, this space can be weaponized: reclaimed as a state of limitless possibility because of Blackness’s inability to be pinned down and defined. The fugitive’s escape from captivity, whether the confines of chattel slavery, the surveillance of the police state, or the snares of the American ghetto, is an act of refusal, a complete disregard of the law and of society’s myriad other power structures. It is an act rooted in the incessant belief that Black people have always been free, that they have never deserved captivity.

In The Creole Show Florence Hines and Black shake dancers went beyond transgression. Their unruly, fugitive acts disrupted racial power dynamics and white hegemonic ideas of Black women and men. They navigated their Blackness, their womanness, and, for some, even their queerness, identity categories representing “metaphysical dilemmas” that cannot be merely transgressed while existing within a straight, capitalist, cis, white hegemonic patriarchal society.¹⁰

The Creole Show appeared at a time when both burlesque and vaudeville eclipsed blackface minstrelsy in popularity. Historians Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff note that “a powerful trend toward burlesque and farce[-]comedy on the American popular stage” pointed then to America’s growing obsession with the “female form and femininity.” White minstrel and burlesque producer Sam T. Jack (a direct competitor of M.B. Leavitt) is credited with creating The Creole Show. Unlike the typical minstrel show, it hosted a predominantly female ensemble, rendering moot the conventional negative Black stage caricatures (the near-exclusive domain of male performers) and unlocking new possibilities for Black representation onstage (especially Black female representation). Most notably, Florence Hines was cast, in her male persona, as The Creole Show’s interlocutor, the straight-man master of ceremonies in the standard minstrel format. (The other minstrel show regulars, the “end men”: the comedians who occupied the left- and rightmost seats on the minstrel line and who played the tambourine and musical bones, were two of the few male roles filled by men in The Creole Show.) Following the trends of burlesque and the lure of the female form, The Creole Show adorned itself with “attractive groupings of shapely femininity,” in various shades of brown.¹¹

A primary draw of The Creole Show was the promise of viewing the Creole figure herself: the “mulatta,” or mixed-race woman, who was, in the words of performance scholar Jayna Brown, “an iconic sign for things that could not be shown” in the United States, like interracial sexual relations. (Brown states further that the Creole woman was made also to represent non-white identities, such as “urban immigrant women, and various female, colonial subjects.”)¹² In doing so, The Creole Show exploited America’s imperialist attitudes and fetishization of the racialized other. Its “Creoles” were lighter-skinned, white-passing Black women, such as Dora Dean, and brown- and darker-skinned performers, like Stella Wiley and Florence Hines. Only a few were actually Creole.

Even as The Creole Show adopted the three-part minstrel format, it did away completely with the racist caricatures that had popularized it. In the place of the minstrel show’s sexless, nurturing, docile mammy figure, for example, the revue presented sensual, well-dressed, confident women of various shades. Venturing onto slippery terrain, The Creole Show exploited the female form and Black women’s sexualities, but did so to provide Black spectators with desirable depictions of the Black female body, in all its variations. In this it was a pioneer.

Although Sam T. Jack has typically received credit for assembling The Creole Show, others have speculated that Black theatre veteran Sam Lucas, known as the “Dean of the Negro Stage,” was the true mastermind behind it—with Jack serving merely as the project frontman. Lucas was a popular singer, songwriter, and minstrel performer who longed to break free from portraying racist depictions of Black people onstage. At the time, most Black performers in America were limited to work in blackface minstrelsy. This was true even for preeminent Black performers like Bert Williams and George C. Walker, contemporaries of Lucas late in his career. Hoping to change this, Lucas, so the story goes, proposed his vision for The Creole Show to Jack when the two men’s paths happened to cross at the Olympic Theatre in Denver, Colorado, where Lucas was performing on tour.¹³

Before serving as talent manager for The Creole Show, Sam Lucas had performed with the successful Black female-led troupe the Hyer Sisters, which produced full musicals performed by all-Black casts. In 1876 sisters Anna Madah and Emma Louise Hyer produced their first venture, Out of Bondage, a farce-comedy on the subject of enslavement in America. Featuring a storyline that shifted distinctly away from minstrelsy’s romanticization of the subjugation of Black people in America, it approached something of Lucas’s desires for Black self-authorship and dignified Black representation onstage. With a prominent white producer at the helm of The Creole Show, Lucas hoped to realize his desires on an even larger scale.

By the time The Creole Show premiered, Florence Hines was already a star. Despite her reputation as one of the greatest male impersonators of the period, minimal documentation about her personal life survives—but rave newspaper reviews provide insight into her performances. For example, the Indianapolis Freeman in 1904 reported that Hines’s talent helped her to command “the largest salary paid to a colored female performer.” She was so prolific that her “male impersonations provided the standard against which African American comediennes were compared for decades,” going on to inspire blues-era performers Lillyn Brown and Alberta Whitman.¹⁴

How and why did Florence Hines get her start in male impersonation? Contemporaneous male impersonator Alberta “Bert” Whitman acknowledged plainly that she had more success with her audiences when she performed as a man.¹⁵ As male impersonators, women could exhibit behaviors and carry out gestures that exposed fragile constructions of gender. They were popular because they made it acceptable, especially for socially marginalized spectators, to poke fun at masculinity and the patriarchy. It is possible that, as a Black woman, Hines, like Whitman, found significantly more career opportunities and social access by performing as a man. These opportunities did not reduce her to an object or an ornament in a chorus line, as was so often the fate of women in burlesque and other musical stage entertainments. Furthermore, playing a well-to-do Black male dandy would have enabled Hines to express in an open forum her rumored queer identity. Under the temporary spell of performance, Hines’s queer desire became publicly acceptable, at a time when public acceptance outside of the theatre required women to be cis-hetero, submissive, dependent specimens.

Dressed in a tailcoat and top hat, Hines’s dandy figure was a white construction: a parody of a well-dressed Northern Black man who dared to access the American dream, fueled by white fears that Northern Black people were acquiring wealth and assimilating into American culture. To many white Americans, dapper Black men were an affront to white male masculinity and to whiteness itself. They created the dandy as a sort of cautionary tale for Black people aspiring to equal footing with whites, an aspiration that, according to the caricature, could only leave them looking foolish in the end. Hines’s dandy—singing original songs like “A Millionaire’s Only Son,” “I Can’t See my Money Go that Way,” and “For I’m the Lad That’s Made of Money”—bragged proudly about his wealth and access, even in the face of white opposition. Her dandy was everything white men and women feared the Northern Black man to be: a social success, not a failure.

In contrast to white minstrel performers who portrayed the dandy as down on his luck, Hines provided an alternative way to view the Black male body on the cusp of the New Negro Movement. Hines’s dandy was sophisticated, charming, and too wealthy for his own good. Scholars frequently credit the comic duo Williams and Walker with the subversive transformation of the Black dandy from its demeaning minstrel caricature into a full-fledged character, informed by lived Black experience and marked by signifying. But Hines’s dandy predates Williams and Walker’s, positioning her as an influential foremother of the phenomenon. As such, Hines’s gender impersonations provided her spectators with new ways to view and process Black femininity. Covered in clothes from head to foot, including her signature top hat, Hines contrasted the voluptuous figures of the female ensemble. She was not sexless, like the minstrel mammy figure, nor was she a sex object, like the Hottentot and Creole stage types. Instead, her fugitive performance of gender endowed her with a different kind of sexual energy entirely, ultimately expanding the palette of—if not outright redefining the possibilities for—Black representation at the turn of the century.

By the 1920s American burlesque largely relinquished parody in favor of striptease. Seeking to capitalize on the mainstream public’s growing fixation with the female body, male producers and managers exploited the transgressive nature of burlesque for their own financial gain. The resulting “Golden Age” of burlesque gave rise to such prominent dancers as Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lili St. Cyr, and Ann Corio.

From this time through the 1950s Black shake dancers like Lottie “the Body” Graves, Jean Idelle, Madeline “Sahiji” Jackson, Tarza “the Exotic” Young, Toni Elling, and Gertrude “Baby” Banks emerged. (Idelle was one of the first Black women to break the color barrier, dancing at otherwise all-white burlesque venues.) To appear more marketable, some Black burlesque performers branded themselves as brown-skinned versions of their white counterparts. For example, Jean Idelle, a Black fan dancer in the 1950s through the 1960s, was nicknamed the “Sepia Sally Rand” after the prominent white fan dancer.

As Sydney F. Lewis uncovered in a guest post on the now defunct blog Racialicious, the all-Black weekly magazine Jet was one of few publications that documented the careers of Black shake dancers. An exposé in its October 29, 1953, issue, titled “Why Girls Become Shake Dancers” provides rare insight into the motivations of Black women who chose to enter the world of burlesque performance, including Gloria “La Bommie” Howard, Betty Brisbane, Elizabeth “China Doll” Dickerson, and the Spence Twins: Joan and Joyce.¹⁶ Brisbane, for example, discussed how she had once worked a low-paying office job, but found burlesque to be more lucrative. China Doll said she danced not only for the good pay, but because the work was “close to her first love, interpretive dancing.” La Bommie, who was told she was too tall to perform as a chorus girl, confessed that shake dancing brought in for her upwards of $500 weekly (almost $6,000 in 2025 dollars), lucrative income for a Black woman in the 1950s. “I’ve got the body to work with,” shared another, unidentified dancer, “so why not make it pay off as long as I can?”¹⁷ These women understood the existing sexual order and how they could use their bodies and performances of sensuality for capital gain. On this evidence, burlesque afforded Black dancers rare financial agency within the mid-century market economy.

According to dance historian Jacqui Malone, the shake and the shimmy originated in Black nightclubs in New York City. Between the 1920s and 1940s Black nightclubs in Harlem were the breeding ground for Black “dance, music, speech, walk and dress,” which influenced American theater and popular culture. Malone writes, “By 1914, New York had at least twenty first-class cabarets, where some of its wealthiest citizens dined and listened to music.” Shake dancing emerged prior to the establishment of these venues, however, sometime around 1880. According to some, dancers at Ike’s Rathskeller—a famous New York City basement bar managed by Ike Hines, a Black banjo player, women were said to have danced “from table to table, shaking like jelly on a plate.”¹⁸ Shortly thereafter exhibitions at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1892 featured the shake, the “Hootchie Kootchie,” a term used to categorize Middle Eastern belly dancing.¹⁹ At sites like these, the sensual nature of these dances attracted the attention of burlesque performers and producers, who in turn encouraged white dancers to copy them. Although white constructions of Black womanhood tended to view Black women’s unruliness as a sign of degeneracy, this perception did little to prevent white female performers from appropriating Black women’s supposed unruly choreography to their own professional benefit.

The concept of fugitivity helps us to understand how Black shake dancers, through acts of refusal and reclamation (refusal to conform to white notions of acceptable womanhood and reclamation of dance moves appropriated from Black culture) delineated themselves from mainstream burlesque, which increasingly consisted of striptease. They were performers who shook but did not strip, an important distinction shake dancers made to resist controlling representations that exploitatively painted them as hypersexual. Those who did take off pieces of clothing rarely stripped down to tassels or a bikini, corroborated by what the 1949 filmed revue Burlesque in Harlem shows.²⁰

A showcase of midcentury Black talent, Burlesque in Harlem features an especially illuminating performance by the “striptease contortionist” Tarza “the Exotic” Young. Toward the end of her routine, Young puts her virtuosic flexibility on display by jumping into a full split, her backside bouncing up and down off the floor. Wearing a bikini-style bra, a white shawl that covers her arms, and a long, flowy skirt, Young’s stomach, where most of her movement originates, remains bare. The white, flowy garments symbolize softness, purity, and femininity operating in instructive contrast to her acrobatic, at times sexually suggestive, physicality. Her performance presents dynamic contradictions of elegance and wildness, softness and aggression. As such, it illustrates the multiplicity of Black femininity: Black femininity is all these things at once. When Young does remove clothing, she appears to do so in order to allow for greater unrestricted movement during more upbeat music, not merely to titillate the audience, as in traditional striptease. Instead of sex, Young foregrounds her dancing skills, as Black shake dancers tended to do. Their innovative approach—born out of conscious resistance to the reverse-theft of white burlesque conventions—became the blueprint that industry giants tried desperately to emulate. Billy Minsky in particular attempted to model his up-and-coming white burlesque dancers on the so-called progressive burlesque he saw coming out of Harlem specifically, as he and his brothers set about building their storied burlesque empire, peaking in the mid-1930s.

By the 1950s, however, burlesque increasingly relied on full nudity. Many shake dancers in the 1950s and ’60s, like Lottie “The Body” Graves, a well-known performer in Detroit’s Black community, ultimately left burlesque when producers pressured them to get naked. Graves explained, “I thought too much of myself.”²¹ As Graves’s story illustrates, shake dancing required always careful navigation of white and Black public perceptions.

Excavating the largely untold history of Black burlesque performers reveals that they were not simply brown-skinned derivatives of their white counterparts. They were rule-breakers, like Florence Hines and the all-Black cast of The Creole Show. They were jaw-dropping dancers, like Tarza “the Exotic” Young, whose innovative physical language became the standard for Golden Age burlesque striptease. They were women on the run from forces working actively to exclude and dehumanize them. Their performances were not just transgressive but fugitive, crafted to undercut social power regimes and to challenge the white norms of mainstream burlesque. And despite cultural efforts to erase Black performers from the history of the form, if we look hard enough, their formative imprints are everywhere.

1
Jacki Wilson, The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 41. ↩︎
2
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (2002; Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi 2009), 155. ↩︎
3
Allen, 25. ↩︎
4
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 26, 3. ↩︎
5
Michel Foucault, “A Preface for Transgression.” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 30. ↩︎
6
Allen, 28. ↩︎
7
Abbott and Seroff, 152. ↩︎
8
Marquis Bey, Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism, (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press), 16, 6. ↩︎
9
Bey, 16-17, 25. ↩︎
10
In her famous choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975), playwright Ntozake Shange describes the experience of Black women of being both Black and women, a metaphysical dilemma that is, by her measure, unconquerable. ↩︎
11
Abbott and Seroff, 152, 169. ↩︎
12
Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 106, 122. ↩︎
13
An account of this meeting appears in Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2014), 1409. ↩︎
14
Abbott and Seroff, 156. ↩︎
15
Kathleen Casey, The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2015), 82. ↩︎
16
Sydney F. Lewis, “Women of Color in Burlesque: The Not-so-Hidden-History” [sic], Racialicious blog (defunct), June 3, 2011, archived on the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20160305012115/http://www.racialicious.com:80/2011/06/03/women-of-color-in-burlesque-the-not-so-hidden-history. ↩︎
17
Jet, October 29, 1953, 35, 37, https://books.google.com/books?id=rEIDAAAAMBAJ. ↩︎
18
Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Pres, 1996), 90, 83–84. ↩︎
19
Brown, 101. ↩︎
20
Burlesque in Harlem, directed by William D. Alexander (T.N.T. Pictures, 1949), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNz7T-DQ3Bc. ↩︎
21
Sarah Klein, “Paradise Regained: A Walk Down Memory Lane with Detroit’s Stripteasers of Yesteryear,” Detroit Metro Times, August 3, 2005, https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/paradise-regained/Content?oid=2182182. ↩︎

Tag: Ashley Dunn

Cementing their Legacy: Black Foremothers of Burlesque