Contemporary Burlesque: Performing for Yourself

A major research project completed as a part of my MA in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories at OCAD University.

This research involved speaking and working with members of the burlesque community, creating workshops designed to share burlesque with my OCAD community, and drawing from my own experiences as someone who as performed burlesque and who has loved burlesque. It became an interdisciplinary and multi faceted project that I plan to continue to work on, post MA.

Building off Laura Mulvey’s theories on the male gaze as well as bell hooks’ theories on the oppositional gaze and Indigenous scholars Carla Rice et al.’s research on the anti-colonial gaze, this paper will define the feminist gaze as an active and informed rejection of the objectifying and power-hungry white, heteropatriarchal, male gaze. Performances done through or for the feminist gaze can be interpreted as empowered and done primarily for the self, in order to activate and engage with one’s agency and subjecthood. Through analysis of the work of two burlesque performers, Miss Paige and Lou Lou la Duchesse de Rière, the feminist gaze can be understood as an active refusal and disentanglement of the male gaze, which constricts women, femmes, and queer people to the role of passive object, providing the performer with opportunities to construct new, intersectional ways of seeing and being that center the self and one’s own agency. Contemporary burlesque uses this feminist gaze to create performances that allow the performer to reject this way of being seen by others and find their own empowerment and agency through a performance of their sexuality that is done for themselves, to resist oppression and celebrate their own pleasure.

This research project also led to the creation of my photo series, "Erotic Eye-Strain," wherein I explore the layers of my own identity through the aesthetics of burlesque and layered photographs.