Viewing Pleasure and Being a Showgirl

How Do I Look?

Alison Carr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351977708
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on interviews with a breadth of different showgirls, from shows in Paris, Las Vegas, Berlin, and Los Angeles, as well as her own artworks and those by other contemporary and historical artists, this book examines the experiences of showgirls and those who watch them, to challenge the narrowness of representations and discussions around what has been termed 'sexualisation' and 'the gaze'. An account of the experience of being 'looked at', the book raises questions of how the showgirl is represented, the nature of the pleasure that she elicits and the suspicion that surrounds it, and what this means for feminism and the act of looking.

An embodied articulation of a new politics of looking, Viewing Pleasure and Being a Showgirl engages with the idea (reinforced by feminist critique) that images of women are linked to selling and that women's bodies have been commodified in capitalist culture, raising the question of whether this enables particular bodies – those of glamorous women on display – to become scapegoats for our deeper anxieties about consumerism.

1 How do they look?

Being and becoming

How we look, how we understand looking, emerges from the apparatuses we use for looking.¹ In this chapter, I consider the ways in which the showgirl has been looked at. I will make connections between the apparatus used for looking and the ways that they have been culturally articulated through theory, art, and entertainment, dividing them into the four ‘modes of viewing the showgirl’, which are: observe, gaze, double-take, and grab.

Mode one: observe

An audience watches a spectacle on a stage, activated by the showgirl. The male theorist sits among the crowd, observing the audience’s encounter with the performance. He decodes the vernacular entertainment, careful not to imply that he might feel the pleasure of the masses in these contexts. Does his theoretical position give him immunity from the charms of what he sees?

‘The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process,’ writes Siegfried Kracauer, ‘can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from the epoch’s judgements about itself’.² Kracauer, the key theorist of Mode One, opens ‘The Mass Ornament’ with this declaration. Read the surface of mass entertainment, sit among the crowds as they are entertained, he seems to suggest, and through this, we will access a larger sense of the society. And this is precisely what he does, along with his fellow writers of the Frankfurt School.

Written in 1927, his essay interprets the formation dancing of the Tiller Girls, the British dance troupe on tour in Germany, as analogous to Fordist factory assembly lines.³ The kick-lines function as the production lines; ‘the hands of the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls’.⁴ The mass of bodies, broken up into body parts through their synchronised, isolated movements, create a meaningless spectacle, a mass ornament that is ‘the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires’.⁵ The use value of this dance-spectacle is its aesthetic, drawn from the age of the production line and its break from the past.

Kracauer does not engage with the working lives of kicking chorus girls in front of him. These troupe-showgirls’ lives were quite unusual: young women, earning their own money, travelling internationally when tourism was not common. The experience of the showgirl on the stage is not of interest to Kracauer.⁶ They are mechanical parts animating a theatrical presentation.

Exposing accepted, naturalised constructs, the ‘what-goes-without-saying’ forms the basis for Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. The collection of essays includes ‘Striptease’, and Barthes, like Kracauer, decodes vernacular entertainment in order to make apparent the structures that media, art, and common sense ‘dress up as reality’.⁷ Barthes considers the meaning of stripping as a form of social control: an inoculation against greater voyeurism, the little bit of evil that produces the ‘immune Moral Good’.⁸

The ‘classic props’ of striptease locate the female body in the domain of the object: ‘the whole spectrum of adornment constantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious objects’. Their effect lingers even after their removal. The final item of clothing, the sequinned g-string, hard and shiny, ‘drives the woman back into a mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable symbol of absolute object, that which serves no purpose’.⁹

Barthes can see the labour in showgirl’s bodies. The ‘professionals of striptease’, he writes, ‘wrap themselves in the miraculous ease which constantly clothes them’ and ‘gives them the icy indifference of skilful practitioners, haughtily taking refuge in the sureness of their technique’.¹⁰ Amateur performers fail to turn themselves into objects through their lack of technique and inability to correctly handle their props. Mastery of technique, dance ability, and adept execution of costume and props are professional skills. The performer must invest effort (tuition, practice, time, purchase of costumes and props) to turn themselves into objects. His observations on the technique and professionalism required to become an object are particularly resonant because of the recognition that the showgirl is not only merely complicit but also an agent, choosing to use her labour in the service of the viewer.

‘The Mass Ornament’ and ‘Striptease’ were written from observation: sitting amongst the crowd in the theatre. To observe, writes Jonathan Crary, ‘does not literally mean “to look at”’; rather it ‘means “to conform one’s action, to comply with,” as in observing rules, regulations and practices’.¹¹ Crary specifically uses the notion of the ‘observer’ in his study of nineteenth-century vision rather than ‘spectator’ because of the latter’s connotation ‘of one who is a passive onlooker at a spectacle’.¹² To ‘observe’ also resonates with Mode One’s style of viewing. We can imagine them, in Berlin and Paris – theorists of mass ornaments observing the crowds. A little distanced, perhaps, from the bodies onstage, and the bodies sitting around them, yet invested in social meaning.

Mode One showgirls perform live in music hall and cabarets; they are live entertainers. Girlie Show, a lesser-known painting by Edward Hopper, visually depicts a Mode One burlesque dancer, strutting out into the spotlight, her head held high. Floating behind her is a swath of blue fabric: a cape or her skirt, perhaps? Her skin glows white in the light, but her head tilt gives her face some shadow. Here, Hopper continues the tradition of Edgar Degas and Walter Sickert, Mode One artists painting theatrical spectacle: the crowd’s faces, showgirls onstage, again, slightly distanced from the crowds by being the observer.

Mode two: gaze

The audience sits in the dark cinema and watches Hollywood films that rely on the erotically stylised woman to generate pleasure. The female theorist sees this scenario constructed for the male viewer and deconstructs it with psychoanalytical theoretical tools. Under scrutiny are the viewing apparatus, constructs of Hollywood, and the multiple gazes in operation, all apparently more complex through the apparatuses of representation: the camera and the cutting room.

The dark cinema, immersive and totalising, was the only place to view classic Hollywood films in the seventies. Music hall entertainment was on the decline. Film theory had begun to enter the academy in a serious way. Psychoanalysis was being used as a theoretical tool. This was the context in which Laura Mulvey, the key theorist of Mode Two, wrote ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which has shaped the mode through its articulation of the male gaze in relation to cinema and showgirls. I focus exclusively on Mulvey’s essay because of its wide-reaching impact, not because it was created in a vacuum; it was not, as other texts did address the Hollywood filmic showgirl and spectator positions from feminist, psychoanalytic, or film theory perspectives and developed theorisations of the gaze.¹³ However, Mulvey’s text has been singled out in particular and I address the content and the process of that singling out.

The essay applies Freudian and Lacanian theory to interpret how classic Hollywood film structures the gaze of the viewer and creates a masculine mode of viewing through its representation of the male gaze, which is both scopophilic, and voyeuristic. Psychoanalysis proves to be a forceful tool in demonstrating a patriarchal organisation of the gaze and its dislocation of a female spectator. The female star is constructed as an object to be looked at: ‘their appearance coded for strong visual impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness’.¹⁴ Mulvey exposes the differences between the substantiated active male characters found in Hollywood films and the female character who is given the visual image in lieu of narrative power, mirroring the social status of women at the time of creation in the thirties, forties, and fifties. She writes:

Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the showgirl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man’s-land outside its own time and space.¹⁵

In Mode Two, the pleasure of watching films is not owned; rather, pleasure implies a power dynamic, and the Mode Two approach does not articulate any personal desire for the filmic image. It is worth noting the similarity with the Mode One writers in reducing the showgirl subjects to a set of signs to be read. In Mulvey’s essay, the signs point to the psychic level of the gaze and the showgirl on-screen becomes invisible, functioning as a cipher of passivity. Mulvey diminishes the possibility of actually seeing the showgirl.

A startling aspect to ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ is how widely the text is read and applied across disciplines. The essay continues to be included in anthologies and a quick search of where and when it has been reprinted sketches out the conversations through which the text has moved. In the seventies, it was included in Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology. In the eighties, it was reprinted in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation; Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader; and Feminism and Film Theory. In the nineties, it returned again in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism; The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality; and The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. In the first decade of the new millennium, the essay appeared in Film and Theory: An Anthology; The Narrative Reader; Feminism and Visual Culture Reader; Audience Studies Reader; and The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. More recently, it may be found in The Gender and Media Reader.¹⁶ And, contrastingly, the video artist Rachel Rose used the essay as a ground for collages in her version o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 How do they look?
• 2 How do I look?: how do I feel as I watch showgirls?
• 3 How do I look?: doing showgirl
• Conclusion: showgirl manifesto
• Appendix: showgirl lexicon
• Index