The Anthropologist in the Museum: What Is Burlesque?

Photo of Burlesque Hall of Fame by Mimi Hyland

As Kerim noted a few weeks back, I am currently the director of the Burlesque Hall of Fame, a museum located in Las Vegas committed to preserving the history and legacy of burlesque as an artform and cultural phenomenon. If you had asked me a few years ago what direction I expected my career to develop in, I’d have never said “Museum Director.” Sure, I’d taken some museum studies courses in grad school and have worked in a couple of museums, but I always thought I’d help out with an exhibition here and there and that would be the extent of my involvement in museums.

Well, life, as they say, happens, and here I am today, responsible not just for an exhibition here and there but for a budget, a nation-wide volunteer network, a collection of 4,000+ artifacts, and a whole slew of legal, professional, and ethical concerns I’d barely even imagined 5 years ago. Since a) anthropology as we know it today grew out of museum practice, and b) the perspective of a museum worker has rarely been seen on Savage Minds, I thought I’d write up a few posts detailing some of the things that occupy my thoughts and time. I won’t be aiming for any grand theoretical statements here, just some musings on what constitutes life in the museum for this particular anthropologist.

And since it’s the question I deal with most, I thought I’d start with a discussion of what burlesque even is in the first place. Defining the field of study, so to speak. Easier said than done, I suppose — burlesque as an art form grades into and branches off from a lot of other theatrical traditions, and has been in a state of near-constant change for at least the last century-and-a-half.

The simplest definition of burlesque is “parody”, typically parody of the powerful by the powerless. In that sense, burlesque can be found in the very earliest theatrical traditions, with pretty clear burlesque elements being found in the plays of Classical Greeks and, closer to our own time, the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By the mid-1800s, first in England then in the United States, large productions featuring what were, at the time, scandalously-clad dancing women and men (wearing tights that showed the shape of their legs and bodies as they danced) had become popular entertainments for emerging urban working and middle classes. Authors from William Makepeace Thackeray to Mark Twain to HL Mencken wrote books of burlesques, providing light humor for an increasingly literate populace.

The lavish extravaganzas of the big city productions were stripped down and sexed up for mass consumption by first minstrel shows and then vaudeville-style theaters, transforming by the turn of the 20th century into variety shows featuring skit humor, sideshow-style acts, and dancing girls. While the promise of a flash of tight-clad leg might have been a draw, the stars of the show were the comics, and not a few household names got their start on the adult-oriented stages of one of the burlesque “wheels”, nationwide circuits of theaters supplied every week with a new traveling show: Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and dozens more.

By the early 1930s, two big changes occurred in burlesque, transforming it into something much more familiar to us today. The first is the siphoning off of comedic talent by radio and talking pictures. While comics remained part of the standard burlesque show lineup, many of the best comics left the grind of the road behind and settled down. At the same time, striptease emerged, shifting the emphasis away from the comics. Just in time, too — as family-friendly vaudeville was replaced by movies (the last vaudeville theater was converted to a movie house in the early ‘30s), its cousin burlesque could offer something neither vaudeville nor Code-era movies could: sex appeal.

By the ‘50s, strippers ruled the burlesque stage. But not “strippers” in today’s sense — striptease was never about showing off the naked body, it was about the process of getting there, the slow seduction of the fan dance offering glimpses of the female form, the tortuous tease of the burlesque artist peeling away layer after layer.

Of course, even as superstars like Blaze Starr and Tempest Storm reached the height of their fame, the culture was changing. Burlesque dancers opened the door, but they weren’t the only ones through. By the ‘60s and early ‘70s, topless gogo dancers, mainstream pornography (movies like Behind the Green Door and especially Deep Throat showed in the same movie theaters that showed The Godfather and 2001), even typical beachwear had made burlesque seem quaint, even a little prudish.

By the ‘80s, live erotic entertainment had solidified around the strip club, emphasis on the “strip”. Gone was the tease, replaced by women who started a set scantily clad, quickly stripped, and then took a turn on the pole or around the stage to collect tips. It’s fair to say that this is still the dominant form of live sexual performance, while hardcore pornography dominates the field of recorded sexual performance.

But these new developments met different needs than burlesque had. Remember, burlesque wasn’t just about the sex, it was about power. Burlesque is parody — when a poor immigrant girl from the ghetto steps onto stage in a fur coat and pearls and proceeds to take her clothes off, she’s not just showing off her body, she’s making a point about the put-on airs of the rich, the place of sexuality in the lives of people used to satisfying their desires through spending.

By the mid-’90s, burlesque was on its way back, with a new generation of women on the lookout for models of femininity a little more empowering than the bone-thin makeup platforms offered them by the likes of Cosmo. Part retro revival, part performance art, the new burlesque celebrated the diversity of bodies and the power of women’s sexuality (and, as time went by, increasingly offered alternative models of male sexuality and power as well).

Burlesque continues to change and evolve, making it many things to many people. As the director of a museum dedicated to burlesque, I feel very strongly that it is not my place, or my organization’s place, to try to produce a definitive definition of burlesque, to try to standardize the meaning of the word, but instead to reflect the way the meaning of the word has changed and continues to change — and hopefully to feed into that process. That said, I can offer a couple of identifying characteristics, a kind of “Field Guide” to identifying contemporary burlesque.

Basically,there are two characteristics of contemporary burlesque, of which at least one should be present. The first is striptease — burlesque dwells on the act of undressing, not on the state of being undressed. The second is humor — the best burlesque should make you laugh like crazy. That’s the big difference between what happens on a burlesque stage and what happens at a strip club: you almost never laugh at a strip club unless something’s gone terribly, and funnily, wrong. That’s not to say stripping, pole dancing, and other forms of adult entertainment aren’t valid in their own right (and quite a few burlesque performers have and do work in multiple fields), only that they’re not burlesque.

There are other factors that distinguish burlesque, especially today’s burlesque — the control the performer has over her act, choreography, and choice of music; the lack of lapdancing and other direct interactions with the audience off-stage; the typical lower limit of nudity being pasties and g-string; and so on — but striptease and humor are, in my opinion, the hallmarks.

So that’s burlesque, and that’s the world I live in. In my next piece, I’ll explore what kind of place a “museum” is, especially in today’s world of blurred disciplinary and institutional boundaries, always-on communications, and complex representational politics.

55 thoughts on “The Anthropologist in the Museum: What Is Burlesque?

  1. What an interesting post! As someone hoping to work in museums, and someone who knows next to nothing about burlesque, I really look forward to reading more about your work.

  2. Dustin, re: “Part retro revival, part performance art, the new burlesque celebrated the diversity of bodies and the power of women’s sexuality (and, as time went by, increasingly offered alternative models of male sexuality and power as well).”

    If the new burlesque is about ‘celebrating the diversity of bodies’, to what extent are non-white (and non-light-skinned, black) bodies–or ‘disabled’ bodies–also being celebrated? To what extent has their been a move away from privileging whiteness and white female bodies?

  3. DWP: That’s a good question. The answer is two-fold: “quite a bit” and “not enough”. Burlesque is, for instance, a field that tends to celebrate bodies of any size, and some of the most amazing acts — and greatest audience reactions — I’ve seen have been plus-sized (sometimes VERY plus-sized) performers; at the same time, larger women find they don’t get booked as often, and when they are booked they tend to be a “token” act among in a line-up consisting of only skinny performers aside from them. Likewise, while quite a few Black, Latino/a, and Asian performers have been well-honored in the field, there is still a lot of cultural appropriation (white women in Native American- or Asian-themed costumes, for example, with all the cultural exoticism and essentialism that goes along with it). There is a wing of contemporary burlesque that is explicitly and often radically feminist and that works hard to dismantle the trappings of privilege, including their own — but there are also a lot of people who refuse or are unable to see how privilege shapes their performances and the audience’s reactions.

    In other words, just like any other field, there are a wide range of political stances and attitudes. Contemporary burlesque as a whole is probably somewhat more shaped by feminist and anti-racist critiques than most, but it’s still an embedded part of contemporary Western culture.

  4. What about other forms of embodied difference, like performers who are amputees, in wheel chairs, etc.? What about these forms of bodily diversity in burlesque?

  5. I feel very strongly that it is not my place, or my organization’s place, to try to produce a definitive definition of burlesque, to try to standardize the meaning of the word, but instead to reflect the way the meaning of the word has changed and continues to change — and hopefully to feed into that process.

    Great post, Dustin. I just want to underline what you say here about not trying to produce a definitive definition of burlesque….but instead “to reflect the way the meaning of the word has changed and continues to change.” Would you, at some point in the future, try to theorize this process? If so, how would you go about it?

  6. If one is going to study or discuss this sort of thing, wouldn’t you also need to talk about mammary obsession, a Western bias that was part of the original purpose of the burlesque?

  7. DWP: Burlesque has close ties to sideshow/circus culture, so there are a few performers I know of who focus on disability and bodily difference, but again, not as much as they might. As in the culture at large, these are invisible issues to most people. That said, our Reunion Weekend in June of this year — the premier burlesque event, a 4-day production with classes, shows, bowling and poker tournament, parties, and the Miss Exotic World competition — featured Mat Fraser as emcee. Fraser has phocomelia of both arms and did a big striptease number with his wife (then wife-to-be) and Miss Exotic World winner Julie Atlas Muz, and is an outspoken critic of the representation of disability in art and the media.

    And actually, since we raise over $10k to bring performers over 55 to the Reunion Weekend to visit, teach, and perform, there are quite a few people in wheelchairs (or Roundabouts) who spend at least a little time on our stage, but our event is hardly typical of burlesque in general.

  8. John: Interesting question. I’m not sure I have an answer, though. Since we serve a community that includes people who performed all the way back to the ’30s (we had 92-year old La Savona on our stage this year to receive a Legend of the Year award) we have to make sense of a lot of different takes on what burlesque is or should be. The performers of the ’50s and ’60s, for instance, are often shocked and disappointed by what they see today’s performers doing, and even among the latest generation there are classicists and avant-gardists. Mostly I’ve tried to take a generous view — if you self-identify as burlesque, you’re in — but I can’t honestly say that everyone is sold on that view. Interestingly, where it starts to matter is at the institutional level; for example, there is a Las Vegas Showgirl Museum, and in the interest of maintaining cordial relationships we don’t want to step on their toes, but obviously the line between burlesque and showgirl is a thin and often porous one, and arbitrary at best. But mostly, from a practical point of view, there hasn’t been a serious challenge so I haven’t had to work overhard to theorize it.

    Which is one of the things I want to convey in this series: in a lot of ways, theory is easy, practice is hard. My hope is that I can build enough “wiggle room” into my practice that there’s room for engagement and interpretation, but as I mention in the next post, that effort can certainly fail.

  9. John: Funny how an article called “The Real Reason Men Love [Breasts]” is all about the real reason women might want men to love breasts, and not about men’s attraction to breasts at all. In fact, the whole first part of the article sets us up for an explanation of men’s attraction to breasts — and then veers off entirely. Still, aside from the fact this kind of uber-adaptationist arguments is almost entirely tautological (humans like breasts because we breed face-to-face so we can see the breasts — never mind that lots of primates mate face-to-face without breasts and that mating face-to-face is far from a human universal. But whatever – if it weren’t wrong, it wouldn’t be evolutionary psychology.

  10. Great article, Dustin. I’ve been reading the above responses, and I think it’s also important to take note that some of us have acts in our repertoire that on the face may appear to be cultural appropriation by a white performer of another culture but may in fact not be. We either may not be what we appear to be–we look white, therefore the audience assumes we are–or it could be a parody of cultural appropriation, as in one of my acts where I basically parody white.privilege. Also, it seems foolish to think the only way we can celebrate diversity is by every audience member knowing the exact diversities that exist. For instance, I have multiple disabilities that I choose not dention stage, which is both empowering for me and something I have chosen to keep from the audience, like if I choose not to take off something. It’s not that I hide it due to shame, but it’s quite interesting that I can get on stage an others have no clue they are either attracted to or at least being entertained by a performer who sometimes has to use a wheelchair or has to rest and then sit backstage just to be able to perform for 4 minutes. From a cultural perspective, it’s important to understand disability, the disabled, and how we choose to identity andot just determine that it would be better to have an amputee on stage to celebrate diversity than an individual with chronic debilitating pain. As a producer, I ensure diversity as much as possible in its various forms, as I often know the intimate details of performers’ lives since I am also a performer, but I cannot choose an individual to perform in ny festival who chooses not to apply, and I will not sacrifice quality entertainment just to make sure that someone else’s standard of diversity is reached. I cast without regard to anyone’s defining features or opinions and only consider talent from my perspective, and occasionally, allow someone a chance on the stage who might not have made me stop and take notice in one way but is deserving of a chance to prove or establish herself (or himself) or just has an overwhelming desire to perform.

  11. Ida, if your comments are primarily for my benefit, then a few clarifications.

    (1) White privilege is about power that one can’t renounce even when one acknowledges it. I am making a structural critique about how race as a political technology functions through the hegemony of vision and independent of conscious intent. As such, when I ask about visual diversity in the kind of bodies represented in burlesque, I am not making some kind of petty, fatuous, and facile suggestion to cast people for reasons of tokenisms and irrespective of ‘talent’ (i.e. to have certain bodies on stage just to have them on stage so one can tick off a ‘we included them too’ box). I am instead asking a question about–and drawing attention to the fact–that the kinds of bodies one continuously does and does not see represented, and especially represented while being coded as beautiful, socializes individual and collective understandings of and expectations for who and what should be seen and understood/perceived/appreciated as both ‘beautiful’ and ‘normal’.

    (2) Please notice that I gave no actual definition of ‘disability’, and tried to avoid even using the term so as to attempt not to reify it, especially in the freighted and problematic ways that saturate the term with normative ideals of a particular kind of white male heteronormative body. This is why I specifically used the term “embodied difference”: because I understand quite well that the terms ability and disability are *relational* and about how bodies are (de)valued **in relation to each other, in systems of power** for reasons that are not simply about how bodies look or function; and I am quite aware that not all ‘disabilities’ are visible.

    (3) I care about people’s feelings (though I fall short of always thinking about others instead of prioritizing myself and my (embodied) experience of the world). So I was thinking about what it must feel like to be an amputee or someone always using a wheelchair for mobility, and how demoralizing it would be to rarely see oneself represented on stage in ways that are coded and understood as ‘beautiful’ and ‘normal’, and not for reasons of tokenism. And I wanted to draw other people’s/antbropologists’ attention to this issue of power/privilege/exclusion, as a reminder to think more critically about normative constructions of bodies/gender/sex/beauty/ability/empowerment, and how they are (re)produced/constructed. This should hardly be a radical admonition–or ‘encitement to discourse’–if anthropology is supposed to be rooted in and productive of radical empathy. (And did Rex not write an entire SM post asserting the very same point, earlier this year?)

    Privilege, and the power asymmetries which produce privilege, should ALWAYS be subjects of anthropological inquiry, especially if one takes the analytic of anthropology as empathy seriously. Because, no, thinking that one has renounced one’s privilege and/or acknowledging its existence does not make the privilege–and concomitant power asymmetries–cease to exist and be salient in (over)determining and structuring social relations.

  12. I wonder if the exhibit talks much about the cultural construction of this form of entertainment as a particularly Western one–it is not something you find historically around the globe, right? The idea of stripping and burlesque was really odd to Japanese people, for example, and it didn’t get established until after it was introduced by the male American Occupationaire. Prewar Japanese, who took public baths together, did not find the nude body especially erotic. It was the parting of luscious clothing to reveal the genitals that was exciting, as nakedness alone was sort of meaningless and déclassé.

  13. Salome, Dance of the Seven Veils (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Seven_Veils). Where does this fit in?

    Returning to the question of mammary obsessions: I have noticed wherever I go in Japan, China, Korea, there are girlie magazines on sale at street corner kiosks and the cover girls are generally more buxom than the average woman on the street. One could argue that this type of magazine that targets primarily male readers is an introduction from the West. But even if the cultural form and the industry that supports it originated elsewhere, it has certainly found a large audience in the East. The customers must like what they see. I have also noted, one does run into these things, that all of these countries have indigenous traditions of erotic illustration that go back, in some cases, several centuries. Japanse shunga, in which the women tend to be plump and the men endowed with gigantic penises, are one example. Looking beyond the Far East, one notices the presence of erotic statuary carved on Hindu temples in South Asia, and, of course, the Kama Sutra. And, coming full circle, there is Salome, Dance of the Seven Veils (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Seven_Veils). Where does this fit in?

    That there are cultural variations in erotic display is demonstrable, but so is the fact that, at the end of the day, there are only so many parts to be shown. How is one to distinguish what is important here? Is the brain chemistry involved a constant, or does it vary from place to place? How are the processes involved related to sexual pharmacopeia?

    Inquiring minds want to know.

  14. Feminist anthropologists have written extensively about this. Female breasts are for feeding babies. It’s only androcentric male ‘scientists’ who are also Westerners, who seem to imagine all sorts of bizarre theories because of their own cultural obsessions. A good starting point is Mascia-Lees, Frances, John H. Relethford, and Tom Sorger. 1986. “Evolutionary perspectives on permanent breast enlargement in human females.” American Anthropologist 88:423-429.

    Breasts were always equated with maternity first in Japan, and they only got eroticized after the war. See my article “Mammary mania in Japan” positions: east asia cultures critique Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2003 pp. 271-300

  15. re: Ida and Disability:

    I’m interested to hear more about what you said about your own experience. From what I gather, you are a performer and you identify as a disabled person, is this right? Or is it that you have a range of ‘disabilities’ but you do not identify as ‘disabled’? Either way, you choose to not display your disabled identity and/or disabilities on stage (in a form of ‘passing’ maybe)? Or is it more subtle than that, and in what ways?

    In addition to asking whether disabled people are present at all in burlesque (which I think is a question that leads to oneman’s response: something like “yeah, but not so much”), I think it’s also important to look at how those disabled people that are present choose to display themselves, as well as how others (producers or whatnot) ‘push’ to represent them (I’m not sure about the specifics of burlesque performances, but from what I gather, this is less the case in burlesque compared to other kinds of performative art?). Is there a spectacle of difference and to what ends? Is there an underlying narrative that this person is talented, beautiful etc. DESPITE their disability (which individualizes disability as some ‘hindrance’ that the individual overcomes because they are an extraordinary person with great determination, etc.)? Or is their show a political move to re-affirm their own identity as disabled, to destabilize the normative matrix that DWP talks about, etc.? And if it is the latter, how does it work and how does it differentiate itself, as a performance, such that it cannot be confused with the other interpretations?

    As far as taking on other identity’s, which I gather is frequent (?), I am guessing burlesque performers don’t perform in blackface? Do they take on disabilities or illnesses that they don’t experience themselves?

  16. @Laura

    I’m inclined to yield to your expertise. But “only eroticized after the war”? Are the breasts exposed in shunga supposed to have been of no erotic interest to Edo Period men?

    Also, what is bizarre about theories based on brain chemistry that are, as stated, perfectly consistent with the feminist claim that female breasts are for feeding babies? Do feminist theorists embrace, for example, something along the lines of Freudian notions of repression to account for how what is postulated to be an intensely enjoyable experience for both baby and mother comes to be forgotten by adult males of at least some societies? What mechanisms are supposed to be in play here?

  17. Ida: Appropriation is a tricky, complex, even convoluted topic. I would say that it’s entirely possible to be exercising privilege (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, able-bodied, etc.) AND be honestly trying to pay homage and respect to the appropriation’s source. I mean, look at someone like Bert Williams, a black performer, one of the highest-paid performers in show biz in the ’20s, who performed in blackface. Convoluted.

    But I think this is something important about burlesque. To burlesque something often means taking something distasteful and pushing it to its most distasteful extreme — and expecting and living with the variety of responses that emerge. That’s the implication of burlesque’s playfulness — playing with social taboos can be pretty dangerous.

    DWP: Fair enough points. But while we’re on the subject of privilege, I think it fair to point out that them are some purty big words yer usin’ there! Ida’s not an anthropologist (that I know of), she’s a performer delivering her own “embodied experience”. One who just got marginalized and shut down by an academic with a shopping bag full of high-falutin’ words.

    You know, when we founded SM in the 14th century, we talked about it as a place for “the educated layperson”, whoever that is. Over the years, especially as my co-Minds have moved into academic careers and institutional positions, SM has become more a conversation among anthropologists, or at least social scientists. And that’s fine, there’s room for that in the great wide world of anthrotalk. But that’s not and never has been my role here. I don’t write here much, but when I do it’s for a general audience — and I bring a general audience with me.

    So you have to ask yourself, are people not privileged with your education and class standing welcome here? Or are we gonna open up the theoretical firehoses to keep their kind out of here?

    By which I mean to say, there’s a world out there where we don’t have to put (paren)theses around parts of words to indicate our desire to deconstruct their meaning or to highlight their ironic polysemity in the context of hegemonic discourses of empowerment and embodiment and blah blah blah *ploosh* (that’s your interlocutor’s cranial structure undergoing a process of reverse intersectionality — that is, their head exploding). We can just, you know, say stuff. Like we were all people here.

  18. Laura: “I wonder if the exhibit talks much about the cultural construction of this form of entertainment as a particularly Western one…”

    Not really, but our permanent exhibition is limited to he US anyway. But modern (post-Industrial Revolution) burlesque isn’t even “Western” so much as “English and American”, and striptease very distinctly American. France had its own similar tradition in the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergere and the like, but without the tradition of parody. Germany had its cabaret, and other countries and traditions had their own erotic performance traditions, but they weren’t quite burlesque (and burlesque wasn’t quite them).

    On the other hand, Neo-burlesque has been HUGE in Japan — I have worked with probably a half-dozen Japanese documentary crews in my 2 years at BHoF, and there are quite a few Japanese performers. And that holds for other places as well — France took to neo-burlesque in a huge way after the release a couple years back of “Tournee”, documenting a tour of several US burlesquers, and Germany, Italy, and Scandinavian countries all have big neo-burlesque movements.

    “Female breasts are for feeding babies.”

    No, feeding babies is something breasts *can do*. Even something breasts are good at. But they also provide pleasure, act as status markers, and fulfill a range of aesthetic, sexual, and commercial functions. To assume breasts are “for” any one thing or other is to impose a purposefulness that a) biology simply doesn’t have, and b) doesn’t reflect social usage.

    See my post “What’s Sex for, Anyway” at http://dwax.org/2006/04/21/what_is_sex_for__anyway/ for a more developed version of this argument (disucssing “sex” instead of “breasts”, but same basic idea).

  19. John: “Dance of the Seven Veils” (or a tribute – of course, the Biblical event is its own thing) has the distinction of being the first striptease number ever filmed, in the mid-1910s with Theda Bara performing. But strictly speaking, “Dance of the Seven Veils” is not burlesque; it comes from the closely-related field of belly dancing, “Danse du ventre”. Which, incidentally, we kind of claim into burlesque history in the US because of its ties to striptease — Little Egypt, who performed the “Dance du ventre” at the Chicago Exposition in 1893, calling it the “Hoochie Coochie” and thus giving label to generation of “cooch dancing”, is very much thought of as a burlesque ancestor. And while we’re going down the rabbit hole, one of the very first things Edison ever filmed was a cooch dancer, which just goes ta show ya!

  20. Maniaku: Actually, blackface was very prominent on the early 20th c. burlesque stage — and if we consider Sophie Tucker’s signature stripping away of a glove to reveal her white arm at the end of her act a form of “striptease”, we can push the origins of striptease back nearly 20 years. And, there actually is a male burlesque performer (our people call it “boylesque”) who does a blackface number today. It’s VERY controversial, of course, and I haven’t seen it so I can’t say whether the intended ironic detachment (supposedly it’s a commentary on racial stereotyping) works or not. And I’ve heard rumors of other blackface performances which, in the opinion of the people I’ve heard about them from, did NOT work as cultural critique.

    Incidentally, Mat Fraser refers to able-bodied persons performing the role of disabled persons on screen or on stage as “blacking up”. People being people, I’ll bet that if you look hard enough you will find all sorts of disability being used to make some kind of humorous point in various burlesque acts — and, at the same time, not a few acts that highlight beauty not DESPITE bodily difference but even BECAUSE of it. Certainly Fraser’s act at our show this year did that.

    I guess my point to everyone is that while I’ve sketched burlesque in general here, there’s a wide range of positions vis-a-vis race, bodily difference, sexual orientation, etc. within the world of burlesque, just as in any community or social movement. Contemporary burlesque has strong feminist roots, and provides an amenable platform for some very outspoken voices critiquing racism, able-bodied privilege, etc. But that there might be more of those voices in burlesque than, say, bookkeeping or racecar driving doesn’t mean that everyone is of a single mind, and just like within feminism itself there are some VERY heated debates about how and whether to address these issues.

  21. Dustin: Take your time, just not too much. Erin and Gawain have put a huge effort into getting the site up and the current top priority is more and more varied content. It can even be something you wrote a long time ago. My first contribution is the English ms for a piece written and published in 1995 in German in a handbook for German businesspeople published by the German Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo.

    My take on PopAnth is that it is the perfect place for demonstrating the kinds of insights that anthropologists can bring to the everyday life around them, leaving readers with the feeling, “Why didn’t we see that before?” But it’s the kind of thing we are up to when telling yarns to our friends or offering advice to clients—entertaining stories, not scholastic sledge hammers.

    P.S. Re the seven veils: My first encounter with the image was reading Nietszche as a freshmen in college—my memory says the source is The Birth of the Drama and the Genealogy of Morals. That was where I found a scenario to which I often refer in discussions of science and philosophy. Nietszche compares the Scientist and the Metaphysician to two men watching Salome perform the dance of the seven veils. The Scientist is content to be tantalized as one veil after another is slowly removed. The Metaphysician is the boor shouting, “Take it all off! Now!”

  22. When was the last time anyone read “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”? One reason we do anthropology is to get beyond our own cultural patterns and assumptions, right? So this idea about what is erotic or what is part of sexual behavior is, of course, culturally molded. Earl Miner wrote: “Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hypermammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.”

  23. Dustin, I find it interesting that you would reprimand me for using my ‘academic privilege’ to shut Ida down, especially as I had no idea that Ida is not an anthropologist and was actually responding to her *as an equal*–not as someone I saw as an intellectual subordinate–precisely because I thought she was a fellow anthropologist.

    But I do find it interesting that this is the second time one of my matter-of-fact critiques of white privilege has been called out as ‘too much book learning’: especially given the multiple times that I have been shut down, mocked, and dismissed by certain of your fellow SM co-authors, who have made a point of using their superordinate positions in the academic hierarchy to silence, if not outright censor, me. And they were certainly not called out for so doing. So it is interesting that, in a post which I reacted to out of annoyance with white-privilege denial yet still made a point of saying was a recognition of my own privileges and a desire to think about them (and was specifically motivated by thinking, empathetically, about forms of embodiment I don’t inhabit), I would be called out for ‘firehosing’ another respondent with ‘purdy big words’ so as to assert my academic privilege and silence her.

    Seriously?

    It is interesting who gets to speak authoritatively on this site, and who does not. As with seeing ‘talent’ (something I also wanted to respond to in Ida’s comment), perceptions of who is authorized to speak (without getting called out for using their ‘academic privilege’ to silence others), and who is exhibiting ‘too much book learning’, are determined in relation to subject position, and often unconsciously so.

    Feels like I’m (again) getting called out for being ‘uppity’, that my comment would have not been called out if I were a (white) male academic expected to be ‘smart’ and assertive, instead of a ‘Who does she think she is?’ woman of color. So while I agree that we should be aware of academic privilege and shutting people out of conversations (on this site), I also think it is questionable that I have just been called out for my academic privilege, for speaking out authoritatively in a context in which my intellectual competence and the legitimacy and validity of my perspective, or perspectives like mine, is constantly questioned, if not marginalized, dismissed, or deemed illegitimate/personal complaint/whining/”meaningless”. That my response was not evaluated in relation to my own subordinated and marginalized subject position, including within the academy, such that I might have other reasons to use ‘purdy big words’ that are NOT about putting others in a subordinate place (but are instead about challenging and calling out constantly being ‘put in place’ as a woman of color) is interesting: Especially as I think I was quite clear that I was not trying to impose my definition of ‘diversity’ on to people like Ida and telling them who to cast, or making claims about who should be defined as ‘disabled’, and was simply wondering about who might be excluded and how this habitual exclusion would feel. 

    Thought-provoking that in the very moment that I was caring about excluding others (and Others), I should be reprimanded for using my academic privilege to exclude others. Is this really the issue? I wonder.

    Lastly, could Ida not have addressed me herself to tell me she felt silenced by my ‘academic privilege’? I have certainly made this comment for myself when I have felt this way. But it is wonderful that you came to her defense to encourage inclusion instead of exclusion. I hope there will be more such advocacy going forward. Because, yes, it does suck to be firehosed and shut down, especially when discussing difficult personal experiences.

  24. Laura: Funny you should mention the Nacirema — I include it in my ANTH 101 syllabus and we read and discuss it the first day of class (since they don’t have books yet and I teach 3-hour sessions, I gotta have something for ’em to do). A lot of neo-burlesque challenges the kinds of body image issues highlighted by Miner; after all, there are plenty of places “the natives” can go to stare at mammaries for a fee these days, we didn’t need burlesque to come back just so we could see some boobs! One of the Golden Rules in today’s burlesque is that ALL bodies have some kind of beauty, which is why so many women find it so empowering. There are plenty of small-breasted performers (many of which have won top titles), and plenty whose “hypermammaries” are matched by the rest of their bodies (Big Fannie Annie, for instance, weighs 450 lbs). But the emphasis isn’t on “what you got” but how you use it.

    It’s also worth mentioning that audiences today are overwhelmingly female. Something like 75-85% at most shows. While there is an argument to be made for the adoption of the male gaze by women in today’s society, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I’m reminded more of the “safe spaces” of feminist “encounter groups” than of strip clubs — places where women (ideally) can express themselves free of judgment.

  25. Dustin, of course women go to these shows. They also buy crappy hooker lingerie from K-Mart for the same reason—they’ve been socialized by a sexist culture to value their bodies above all else (consult any recent poll asking young women what they worry about most). I doubt that audiences at these shows are representative of “what women want/think, but it isn’t surprising, and it also isn’t a good sign of the state of American gender politics. Quoting Anna Quindlen “It’s babe feminism — we’re young, we’re fun, we do what we want in bed — and it has a shorter shelf life than the feminism of sisterhood. I’ve been a babe, and I’ve been a sister. Sister lasts longer.” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1994

  26. DWP: I know, ain’t privilege a bitch?

    Here’s the thing: Ida is the only actual performer who visited the site and expressed her experiences as a performer — experiences which were essentially dismissed with a rhetorical flourish that redefined “disability” (or whatever you want to call it) to veer almost completely around her experiences. Now, I didn’t think of myself as defending Ida, whose comments are not above critique and who, I assume, can defend herself; my concern is with language that closes discussion off to a handful of people “in the know” and essentially excludes the very people we anthros are talking about. This is hardly a new problem!

    Now, I know, you don’t see status; you assume everyone is “equal” (with the “to you” implied, of course) and how could that be wrong? And yet, it’s pretty plain that Ida didn’t come here as an academic, and while I’m sure she’s bright and accomplished (you’d be surprised how much brain-power the burlesque field has at its disposal!) she somehow managed to express herself in plain language. I don’t think there’s any rule that says we anthros can’t do the same.

    As for your supposed marginalization at the hands of my fellow SMers, I think your confusing the work of maintaining a big online community and the critical engagement the community is supposed to engender with some kind of personal vendetta. Sometimes comment threads need to pushed back on-topic, toned down, or even cut off. And sometimes people need to be challenged, like when they come down with the weight of all their book-larnin’ on a newbie.

    That said, my fellow SMers — and myself — are surely guilty of big-wording it up here and there. It’s a balance — look at who you’re responding to when you pick your words, eh? I’m happy to get all Gramscian up in this blog with ya, but when you’re responding to other commenters, it pays to think about who they are.

    Gah, whatever — I don’t mean to turn this into a lecture on netiquette, it’s just frustrating to think that a newcomer like Ida might well see SM as a place where only academics are allowed to express themselves. Part of the point of this series is to explore ways anthropology can exist outside of the academy, and while that doesn’t have to mean dumbing things down it *does* mean adapting our langauge to the needs of different audiences — who may still be “equals” without our fancy-schmancy post-grad educations.

  27. @John There are a few great academic studies of shunga now published by Timon Screech. He looked at thousands of these prints, and notes that breasts are not a focus at all in most of them. In fact in many cases the sex of the participants is not easily apparent from the clothing and hairstyles, it is only the revealed nether regions that allow the viewer to make a determination. The shunga that have breasts in them seem to be the ones Westerners reprint, of course.

  28. @Discuss White Privilege It is clear that you are continuously mocked or silenced on Savage Minds. “Ain’t privilege a bitch?” is precisely the sort of kiss off that scholars of color and feminist academics face in all their endeavors.

  29. “[W]e’re young, we’re fun, we do what we want in bed — and it has a shorter shelf life than the feminism of sisterhood. I’ve been a babe, and I’ve been a sister. Sister lasts longer.”

    Hmmm, I kind of completely disagree with that quote. In fact, I see the rise of not just neo-burlesque but roller derby, rockabilly culture, the riot grrl movement, all about the same time Quindlen said it, as a direct response to the brand of 2nd Wave feminism that opposed “fun” and “sisterhood” (and of course a “sisterhood” that flattened differences of racial, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.). That’s not to say sisterhood isn’t a factor in contemporary burlesque — it’s powerful, indeed! — along with other stock feminist ideals like women’s control over their own bodies, the power of self-representation, the rejection of male-centered body image models, and so on. But the 2nd Wave tended towards a model of sexuality and sexual expression that was drastically limited and limiting, and basically not fun. Today’s burlesque (and all those other mid-90s movements, along with phenomena like the later rise of recreational pole-dancing) posit that fun and sisterhood can go hand in hand, that sexuality while still a political statement doesn’t have to be a dissertation, and that there are more ways to be empowered than were dreamt of in the 2nd Wave’s philosophy. Granted, the mainstreaming of burlesque, like the mainstreaming of porn culture, nerd culture, computer tech, indeed feminism itself, can certainly lead to vulgarization, but I think that’s an opportunity, a moment when a space opens up, maybe just a little bit, where not just the cooptation of the external form (“babe feminism”, I suppose) but real sharing becomes possible.

  30. Laura: Please rad more carefully. I’m not “kissing off” DWP, I’m asking her to step off the podium and come down and mingle with the commoners — and part of that is recognizing her own privilege when she’s coming down on others for the same. And that *is* indeed a bitch, because it’s a heckuvalot easier to call out privilege in others than in ourselves.

    Hell, I haven’t been paying too close attention to SM for a long while, so maybe things’ve changed around here, but I still think of SM as a place for general discussion of things of interest, not just a place where we make the case for tenure. Seems we can do that without reaching for our Big Book of Really Big Words.

  31. Well, as Dave Mason sang “There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy, there’s just you and me, and we just disagree.” Fortunately there are many young women who disagree with your old worn argument that “old” feminists aren’t interested in defining their sexuality in ways that cater to American men’s tastes are therefore lacking fun, lacking a sense of humor, etc. But evidently, they just aren’t here on Savage Minds.

  32. “Fortunately there are many young women who disagree with your old worn argument that “old” feminists aren’t interested in defining their sexuality in ways that cater to American men’s tastes…”

    I’m not sure where you got that from, *I* certainly didn’t say it. I think of something our previous director told me. She grew up among prominent NY 2nd Wavers (Bella Abzug as a dinner guest, that sort of thing) and they all told her when she grew up she could be anything she wanted to be — a judge, a CEO, the President, ANYTHING. “But,” she says, “what I wanted to be was a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader!”

    Burlesque isn’t about sex. In fact, though this is anecdotal, in my experience burlesquers tend to be somewhat conservative in their personal lives (with some pretty drastic exceptions, of course, but that’s true of accountants, too). Burlesque is about performance, and yes, sex and sexuality are frequently burlesqued, but so are politics, religion, class (often hand in hand with sex), and popular culture. But even beyond the stage, I think what appeals to a lot of burlesquers is the glam aspects — the carnival-esque part of it. Not a few performers in the ’90s got into burlesque because of their love of male drag culture — why should the boys get all the sparklies?!

    Granted, this post is a rough sketch of what burlesque is so that I can set up the museum work I’m writing about in the next few posts, so it can’t give much of a picture of the diversity of burlesque, but even so, I think it’s pretty self-evidently a mistake to try to boil down a complex human phenomena to a catchphrase (“babe feminism”) or a single mindset. Go to a show, talk to some of the performers, read some of their blogs. Burlesque is generally conflated with strip club performance in the mainstream, which is a way of marginalizing and dismissing it, and the experiences of the women involved — which of course raises the question of why we allow ourselves to think of strip club performers that way, too — but I think we anthro-minded folks can at least try to listen more closely than that.

  33. Dustin, please just go ahead and call me an Uppity Negro. It would be far more honest than all these ‘step off your podium’ euphemisms. Sorry, but I think the accusations lodged against me for deploying my ‘academic privilege’ to silence Ida are rather disingenuous. Let’s just call a spade a spade, right? Pun intended.

  34. @Laura
    Thanks for the pointer to Timon Screech. Can’t tell you how grateful I am to someone who responds to one of my challenges by pointing to a source of fresh information. Sounds very interesting.

    @Dustin
    Generational differences in feminism is a topic close to my heart. I’ve told this story before but it seems of particular relevance here.
    My daughter, an only child brought up in Japan, shocked her former new lefty, anti-Vietnam War, 60s “crunchy” parents by winning an appointment to the US Naval Academy. Her first assignment after graduation was temporary duty at the Pentagon during the summer of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair. She was overheard discussing the affair with her male boss (a lieutenant commander) and called on the carpet by a more senior woman officer (a lieutenant, the daughter was only an ensign). The male boss was arguing that since Lewinsky was in CLinton’s chain of command, the affair was fraternization and a violation of military rules by the commander in chief. The daughter replied, “Bullshit, sir, this is clearly a case of consenting adults, like of you and I decided to go at it right here on the floor.”

    Later, when we discussed the incident, she remarked that the Lieutenant who called her on the carpet had joined the Navy via the Reserve Officers Corps (ROC) at a time when women were excluded from command and combat positions and, in an effort to be like the men, in effect neutered themselves. She herself was a graduate of Annapolis, a line officer for whom both command and combat were possible. She and the other female midshipmen in her class at Annapolis knew that they were attending an ultra macho institution where many of the men believed that they didn’t belong. So in uniform they had to perform 120% (a Japanese expression meaning above and beyond) to avoid criticism that they were able to get away with stuff and win promotions by being women. Out of uniform, however, they were perfectly comfortable being girls. My wife remarked that, if you saw them in Georgetown night clubs, the only way that you could tell that they were from the Academy was their ramrod straight military posture.

    I think, too, of two of the Japanese women I interviewed for my book on Japanese consumer behavior. Both were researchers at the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a consumer research think tank whose material I was using. The older was upset by younger women who, after being hired for prestigious jobs at the agency would quit after only a few months. She saw their actions as a betrayal of all that she and older Japanese feminists had fought for. The younger was far more sympathetic, seeing both work and marriage as part of a range of options that might include part time work and travel or study instead of buying in to the kill yourself for the company ethos that men were supposed to buy into. The real shocker was when young men started doing the same thing.

    Do these anecdotes bear on our reading of generational differences in feminist attitudes? I think they do. But I wonder what others will see in the same ethnographic data.

  35. Dustin, I knew you were de facto calling me an Uppity Negro when you doubled down on your dubiously-motivated snark by saying that ‘of course I see everyone as equal to me’, when clearly this was not the kind of easy flattening of status hierarchies that was going on in any of my comments. It is interesting how you keep asserting that I silenced Ida and dismissed her comments on her own experience of disability when a reading of my comments shows this is precisely NOT what I did. I never commented on Ida’s experience of disability, or said it was in any way illegitimate. All I did was respond to what I saw as flawed and incorrect assumptions about what I had written about diversity in burlesque and embodied difference: both to make clear that I was not defining what counts as disability or advocating tokenism. I hardly see how this amounts to shutting Ida (and her experience of disability) down.

    Similarly, pointing out that one doesn’t get to renounce white privilege simply because one wants to is a fairly simple statement which one does not need to go to college to understand. And I think that it is interesting that you think it should have been obvious to me that Ida is not coming here as an anthropologist. Why should this be ‘obvious’ to me, especially since many anthropologists engage in white privilege denial when speaking out about their experiences? I figured I was just encountering another such response–from a person who very well could be both a performer and an anthropologist/anthropologist-in-training. The last time I heard a discussion of burlesque was on PBS a few weeks ago, and the performer being interviewed was–wait for it–an anthropologist!!! More precisely, she had come to burlesque from majoring in anthropology in college. So, your haughty, snarky ‘get off your podium’ comments to me are bunk. I precisely was not on a podium wielding my ‘academic privilege’ like a cudgel with which to bludgeon Ida and all others with ‘fancy-schmancy post-graduate educations’.

    So if you think I’m an uppity Negro with too much book-learnin’, then have the courage to come out and just say so. Because I’m calling bullsh*t on how and why you’ve called me out for silencing people with my ‘academic privilege’. This is NOT why you have jumped all over my comments as you have–while misreading them and accusing me of things I actually went out of my way not to do. I don’t appreciate your abusive snark.

  36. DWP: If I’d been calling you an “uppity negro”, well, first off, I guess Id’ve had to have known you were black; since I didn’t know who you were until this thread, that kinda seems unlikely, don’t it? More to the point, “uppity” is what you call someone who is trying to act the equal of “us white folk”, who is stepping above his or her station, and I’m pretty sure asking you to tone down the jargon so “us white folk” can engage in conversation with you is the OPPOSITE of that. Of course, maybe “us white folk” ain’t so white, who knows? I’m just assuming I am because I’m loaded with white privilege, like having a blog.

    That said, I think I pretty honestly engaged with your comments, citing several instances I could think of where disability is referenced in some way within burlesque. But here’s the thing: writing matters. And if privilege matters, and I think it does, than the writing of privilege is open to critique. If I was a little heavy-handed in making that point, well, I wanted to make sure that point was taken, and sometimes a hammer is a better way to drive a nail than a feather.

    The bigger point is, we don’t have to talk like PhD candidates to do our jobs. It’s show-offy (you say so yourself*), but more importantly, it closes out non-academics. In which category, I guess I’m increasingly bound to include myself. When someone pulls out a great big grad school vocabulary in challenging the comments of someone else who used plain language, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who asks what’s going on there. And when someone who clearly has been privileged enough to gain that top-notch education talks about privilege in a completely non-reflexive way, those questions intensify.

    Now, feeling put upon is, I suppose, a time-honored response to being called out for exercising privilege, but I promise, I didn’t mention it to make you feel put-upon. And I certainly didn’t mean to belittle your educational accomplishments — I teach *for fun*, I’m obviously a big fan of educational achievement. But I have spent years, maybe decades, exploring the extent and effect of my own privilege; I don’t think asking others for a little self-reflection is the evillest thing in the world.

    * “That my response was not evaluated in relation to my own subordinated and marginalized subject position, including within the academy, such that I might have other reasons to use ‘purdy big words’…”

  37. Sorry, Dustin, but I’m not buying it. Especially as I made a point of pointing out my own privilege in my own comment before you called me out for my ‘academic privilege’. And given that I referred to myself as a woman of color prior to your doubling down on the snark, I don’t think your being honest (with yourself) about your motivations for slapping me down so rudely. I do thinking talking about academic privilege is valid, but in the way you did it the goal was to be abusive and ‘put me (back) in my place’.

    I have seen plenty of other people make ‘academic’ comments on this site without being told to ‘get off their podium’, so no, I don’t think that the slap was disconnected from by being a non-white woman who chose to speak authoritatively. Keep insisting the slap-down was a function of trying to silence others via my academic privilege, but I’m not buying it. And I’m not the only one.

  38. Actually, I did NOT say that I chose to speak in a more academic register to show off. WRONG, and exactly the opposite of the point I was making. The point I was making was that I responded as I did because I constantly have to deal with being dismissed because I am assumed to be a stupid black woman/black person, or am dismissed as just ‘whining’ about racism and sexism which does not objectively exist, while being told that I have no expertise to speak authoritatively about anything not stereotypically defined as ‘black’ (like the SM commenter who assumed I listen to and live rap/hip hop). So no, I do NOT defer to an academic register to ‘show off’. I simply do it to combat the constant barrage of ‘shut up whiny, stupid black woman’ attacks and assumptions I am always having to deal with. But says a lot that you read this as showing off. Hilarious. Especially coming from a person who just jumped all over me–again and again and again–for not thinking enough about my own privilege!

  39. DWP: Well, like I said, I haven’t spent a lot of time at SM for the past few years. I’m sure plenty of people are too jargon-y here, but I can’t be responsible for what people do when I’m not here and on posts I didn’t write. And in any case, like I said before, know who you’re talking to — sometimes book-y talk is appropriate, sometimes it’s not. You don’t have to think less of someone to talk to them like a person instead of an academic.

    As far as “slapping you down”, well, it’s probably true that I knew you were a woman of color after you said you were a woman of color. But I wasn’t reacting to that, I was reacting to an aggressive use of language against a newcomer to the site. Yes, I might be a little defensive, because I invited in a bunch of people who aren’t part of SM’s normal audience and I don’t want them to get the wrong idea about what anthros do and about what I do. That said, if you read “racism” into that, I have to put that on you — you knew you were a woman of color before I did. And while I am very aware of the various privileges society affords me due to my apparent race, gender, sexual orientation, relative able-bodiedness, nationality, class, native language, education, and so on, I am pretty sure my motivations here have little to do with your womenness or colorness.

    Now, if you’d like to return to a discussion of representations of bodily ability/disability/etc., I’m happy to do so, but I’m going to have to call any further discussion of your alleged uppitiness too far off-topic to continue. You may have the last word if you like, since I think I’ve said everything I need to say on the matter.

  40. Discuss White Privilege,

    This should hardly be a radical admonition–or ‘encitement to discourse’–if anthropology is supposed to be rooted in and productive of radical empathy.

    I dislike David Brooks, and I have a feeling you dislike him just as much, if not more, but this article seems appropriate. Empathy isn’t quite the force we often think it is. I don’t think social science should be predicated on spreading it. Not sure about burlesque, though.

  41. Wow. I linked to Dustin’s article because, as a former student of anthropology and former graduate student in the social sciences, I longed for something that looked at burlesque through a more scholarly lens. Perhaps this was not the site. I did feel that Dustin’s article did a great job of dumbing it down for those of us who only have a bachelor’s degree and are not to the same level of intellectual superiority that is obviously required here. I could see nobody’s gender or skin color from looking at the post and only found this out when it was pointed out by those posting (other than Dustin’s because I have seen him in person, though I do not know him). I feel that he has done an excellent job of explaining how the burlesque community is more accepting than the general public of those who are different. I see difference as something that is actually usually celebrated within burlesque. I don’t think I try to “pass” as able bodied, but if it comes off that way, there is some irony in that and I will relish in it. And, as a female who has been a political activist for those who might be considered intellectually inferior by others for many years, I do not see burlesque as something that oppresses anyone. I did want to provide my perspective as a performer, allbeit an intellectual subordinate, but I did not realize that it would cause such a stir. I can use the big words, too, but my professors taught me to only use the words that were necessary and my good manners taught me that doubly applies when not trying to make others feel inferior. I have found burlesque to be a sisterhood, even though there are some men involved. Just like any sisterhood, there are things we disagree on, but for the most part, my burlesque sisters–regardless of skin color, disability, or any other differentiation–would be none too happy with someone thinking they are better than me just because they have more schooling. By the way, I am the first person in my family to go to college, so I often have to “dumb it down” at home so that my family doesn’t feel that I think I am better than them. It’s something I am happy to do if it makes another person not feel bad about his or her lack of education or status. I was seriously considering going back to college to pursue a master’s degree in either sociology or anthropology, but if the majority of academics will treat others with less education like this, I choose to just slum with my fellow burlesquers. It did take me a while to respond because I am solely producing and directing Alabama’s first burlesque festival that features individuals of a variety of ethnicities, abilities, and gender identities.

  42. Ida, terrific! Allow me to recommend that you write something about burlesque for PopAnth, where the mission is to communicate anthropological insight without the anthropological jargon.

  43. Ida, I don’t appreciate your abusive snark either. Not your veiled digs, John. Especially as you are a person who has made racist and sexist comments to me in the past, which other people called you out for doing. I am tired of these claims that I think I am better than people and am talking down to them. It is passive-aggressive racist microagression, so let’s not pretend otherwise. I have twice explained that I responded as I did to Ida precisely because I thought of her as an intellectual equal, so enough already with the racist microaggressions. They are tired and petty. If Dustin wanted a ‘jargon free’ comment stream, then he should have said so himself. Moreover, given what I wrote about how my daily experience of racism and sexism affect what register I choose to respond in, and such that I am NOT writing in an academic register to show off or to tell Ida that she is too stupid and under-educated to talk to people, it is quite clear that she and John (as well as Dustin) are in fact being racist in continuing to insist that I am just showing off. Yes, you are being racist. Like I said, call me an uppity Negro and be done with it. Because obviously you think someone like me can’t write as I do without being lectured about not knowing my ‘place’. Re-examine that sisterhood, Ida, because your comments to me–after I made it EXPLICIT that I saw you as an equal and was NOT talking down to you because I saw you as a less-educated subordinate–are not feminist sisterhood.

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