After the Second World War, Vancouver emerged as a hotbed of striptease talent. In Burlesque West,the first critical history of this notorious striptease scene, Becki Ross delves into the erotic entertainment industry at the northern end of the dancers' west coast tour - the North-South route from Los Angeles to Vancouver that provided rotating work for dancers and variety for club clientele.
Drawing on extensive archival materials and fifty first-person accounts of former dancers, strip-club owners, booking agents, choreographers, and musicians, Ross reveals stories that are deeply flavoured with an era before ""striptease fell from grace because the world stopped dreaming,"" in the words of ex-dancer Lindalee Tracey. Though jobs in this particular industry are often perceived as having little in common with other sorts of work, retired dancers' accounts resonate surprisingly with those of contemporary service workers, including perceptions of unionization and workplace benefits and hazards. Ross also traces the sanitization and subsequent integration of striptease style and neo-burlesque trends into mass culture, examining continuity and change to ultimately demonstrate that Vancouver's glitzy nightclub scene, often condemned as a quasi-legal strain of urban blight, in fact greased the economic engine of the post-war city.
Provocative and challenging, Burlesque West combines the economic, the social, the sexual, and the personal, and is sure to intellectually tantalize.
By:
Becki Ross
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 236mm,
Width: 158mm,
Spine: 32mm
Weight: 720g
ISBN: 9780802096982
ISBN 10: 0802096980
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 25 July 2009
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
"Chapter One: Uncloaking the Striptease Past Early Twentieth Century Burlesque and the Tease Factor Postwar Contradictions Vancouver: Terminal City Postwar Striptease: the Stain of Stigma, Ill-understood Paradoxes, and the Dearth of Sleuths Economic Efflorescence: Under the Thumb of Abolitionists Wilfully Plucky: Negotiating the Stripper Stigma Bankrolling My Research Righteous, Angry Canadians Sound Off Oral Histories Unlock the Vault Why Me? Chapter Two: ""I Ain't Rebecca, and This Ain't Sunnybrook Farm"" Men Behind the Marquee Postwar Vancouver Heats Up After Dark Classic Burlesque at the State Theatre Fancy Nightclubs in the City's West End Celebrities Work Their Magic Amidst the Stalactites at the Cave Supper Club Deluxe Showgirls at Isy's Supper Clubs The Penthouse Cabaret: The City's Oldest Stationary Funhouse East End Nightclubs: Smilin' Buddha, New Delhi, Kublai Khan Shakin' It Up at the Harlem Nocturne Hotel Explosion in the City and Beyond Legal Conundrums: Hounded by the Law Post-Decriminalization Changing Times Tarred by the Brush of Immorality Chapter Three: ""You Gotta Have a Gimmick"": Dancers and Their Acts Undressing for Success: White American Queens of Striptease Set the Glamour Bar Impersonating the Exotic Other Diversities Abounded Among Locals in the Port City White Vancouver Dancers Perfect a Gimmick Racy Acts: Black Stripteasers and the White Imagination Chinese, Latina, South Asian and First Nations Dancers: More Absent than Present Hoochie Coochie Queers Work Terminal City Playing the Striptease Game Chapter Four: ""Peelers Sell Beer, and the Money Was Huge"": The Shifting Conditions of Work ""Ladies and Genitals, Let's Tickle Your Pickle, Heat Your Meat, and Pop Your Cork"" Money: Making It and Spending It Dancers and Their Co-Workers Dancers' Relationships with Patrons Traveling the Circuit Supplementing Striptease Work Augmenting Marketability Transition to Poles and Showers on Hotel Stages Spreading and Split Beavers A New Era Dawns Chapter Five: ""Everyone Wanted to Date a Dancer, Nobody Wanted to Marry One"": Occupational Hazards in the Industry Stripper Stigma as Occupational Hazard Temptations of Drugs and Alcohol The Toll of Sexual Harassment and Assault Women Make Waves in Unions Country-Wide A Small-Scale, Transient Business Dancers Compete as Freelancers The Anti-Union Resolve of Club Owners and Booking Agents Dodging the Law Uninterested Male-Dominated Unions and Unreceptive Labour Law Directing Activist Energies Forward Processes of Downsizing and Deskilling Dancing in the 1980s: The Me-Generation Chapter Six: ""You Started to Feel Like a Dinosaur"": Exiting and Aging in the Business The Pleasures and Perils of Risky Business The Respectability Sweepstakes Exiting and Aging Post-1980 Changes in the Business Repudiations Recur Striptease Spin-offs Trouble the Whore Stigma Contemporary Organizing Olympian Beauty Games The Steel-Shafted Stiletto: A Museum Artefact in the Offing?"
Becki L. Ross is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of British Columbia.
Reviews for Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver
'Ross's book is outstanding? Ross very effectively uses the erotic entertainment business as a lens through which to view Vancouver history in the post-World War II period ? a hugely important period in shaping what the city was to become? it gives us insight into the entire industry, profiling not only the strippers and the problems they faced, but also the men who owned and ran the clubs.' -- Gerald Hunt: Labour/leTravail, vol 67: Spring2011 'Ross paints a complex and rich historical snapshot of Vancouver nightlife and argues that the industry was fundamentally important to the city's burgeoning economy.' -- Lara Campbell
- Winner of Clio Prize for British Columbia awarded by Canadian Historical Association 2010 (Canada)
