Revisiting the “passée”: history rewriting in the neo-burlesque community

Neo-burlesque, or the “burlesque revival,” is a movement that emerged in the 1990s, with retro-inclined consumers revisiting old-fashioned striptease performances informed by the burlesque satirical tradition. Based on an 18-month ethnographic immersion in North American neo-burlesque communities, our initial research sought to understand how this movement acts as a forum through which forms of female representations are retrospectively enacted and revisited. While providing for empirical evidences that a feeling of incongruity can be experienced by members of retro communities such as that of neo-burlesque – particularly with regards to gender ideals, including body and sexual identity – this paper argues that certain types of neo-burlesque practices disrupt the nostalgic or contemporary logic of idealisation and, as such, can reinvest non-idealised identities, bodies with new meanings and legitimacy in the present.