Nope, today I'm cashing in my bragging rights. I presented a paper (in absentia, so technically I wasn't there, but my paper was presented) last week at a pop culture conference. That's right, kiddos! There's an entire academic conference devoted to all things pop culture. Seriously. Name any TV show, game (video or board), cultural phenomenon, trend, or even social issue (Fat Studies is a category, for example), and odds are somebody presented about it at the conference. Sadly, I had to miss it due to scheduling conflicts.
I've gotta say, I like this academic/presentational writing thing. I hope to keep it up!
Turns out I've gotten some requests from attendees for copies of the paper. In the interest of creating great accessibility to my academic writing while protecting my authorship, I started myself a fancy scholar social media page here. So please check it out! Here's my abstract:
Tit for Tat: Burlesque and
Pop Culture
An Exploration of the
Potential Benefits and Drawbacks to the Mutual Appropriation Between Mainstream
Media and Neo-Burlesque
Today,
pop-culture references cover neo-burlesque stages in as much quantity as
glitter and marabou. Jo “Boobs”
Weldon includes an amazing Godzilla act
in her repertoire. Dottie Riot
pays homage to Swamp Thing. Doc Wasabassco and Nasty Canasta wrote
and created a tribute to King Kong. Nerdlesque troupe D20 cultivated an
evening of burlesque numbers based on the work of iconic sci-fi writer/director
Joss Whedon. Uncle Monty’s
Mollyhouse spoofed Downton Abbey with
“Slagtown Abbey.” Each of these
performances have occurred in New York City within the past year, and they
serve as a minute sampling of a plethora of pop-culture and mass-media inspired
acts by burlesque performers.
These pieces are always crowd-pleasers, allowing the audience to
immediately recognize the zeitgeist in question and feel as though they are
“in” on the joke. While not
requisite as part of a show, the pop-culture-referential act is gaining solid
footing in neo-burlesque, to the delight of performers and audiences alike.
Appropriation of material has recently
become mutual between burlesque and widely distributed entertainment. Feature films such as Burlesque, starring a multitude of
familiar Hollywood faces, claim to introduce audiences to the art form, while
two separate crime procedurals feature burlesque performance as a facet of
homicide cases. Watching the hit
television series Dancing With the Stars,
a viewer often watches bedazzled dance routines featuring bump ‘n’ grind moves
with FCC-approved (and therefore very minimal) striptease. As burlesque borrows from entertainment
and pop culture at large, so do writers and producers on the small and large
screens.
The cross-pollination of small-scale
live performance with mass-distributed recorded performance proves inevitable
in the digital age. But: does this
mutual appropriation of medium benefit the burlesque community? Burlesque will present material
inspired by large-scale entertainment with a wink and a smile, acknowledging
the playful and satirical nature of the portrayal. Does American media do the same in its diametric treatment
of burlesque -- nearly Disney-fying some performances while literally vilifying
burlesquers in others? Is it
possible to achieve symbiosis in this unbalanced relationship? And, most importantly, should the
burlesque community be concerned about the accuracy of the representation of
our medium as it is portrayed to a national audience by artists outside the
burlesque world? Or, ought we peel
off our concerns as easily as a silk stocking and keep dancing?
