Burlesque West

Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver

Becki Ross

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English

University of Toronto Press
25 July 2009

History of the Americas; Social & cultural history; Ethical issues: pornography & obscenity; Gender studies: women

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: 230mm, Width: 154mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 640g
ISBN: 9780802096463
ISBN 10: 0802096468
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 25 July 2009
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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 BC Studies; Number 169: Spring 2011