Greatings to all of you!
To answer your long awaiting question Buttons, I have decided to conduct my cyber ethnographic research in several locations where can be found the neo-burlesque community online, mostly: artist’s websites, myspace pages, yahoo groups, blogs, as well as the burlesque-oriented facebook groups and promotional messaging. I did refrain from studying the profiles of my facebook burlesquer friends, for ethical concerns, since I find the line is too thin between the burlesque personas and their daily life identities. Furthermore, I don’t see how enlightening could be their family reunion pictures with regards to my research interests.
As per suicide girls and god girls, which are essentially alternate porn websites with girls adopting the punk, goth, rockabilly, and even burlesque esthetic codes, I believe it is a bit different than neo-burlesque itself, which is more subtle in it’s displaying of sexuality. Usually, burlesque shows will not feature women stripping beyond a pair of pasties – which is part of the code and the tradition. Now I didn’t explore them exhaustively, but I would not be surprised, and I would even expect to find some burlesquers on these sites. I will not be positioning myself here because I don’t know enough about the type of representation of women (is it objectifying or subjectifying? I have yet to answer this question for burlesque) but I believe the same type of “ecriture feminine” analysis could be conducted – even considering the porno nature of the sites – as long as it implies the subjective experience of women:
“Writing the feminine body is, to be sure, a difficult undertaking, but it remains a mechanism by which women can continue to subvert the signifying practices of a male-dominated culture. In particular, this includes television, advertising, films and pornography – all the institutions that privilege and propagate male desire. Women’s otherness, as posited in “ecriture feminine” is an attempt to dislodge such culture-specific mediation of the female body (Dallery, 1989, p.6)” (Excerpt taken from Postmodernism, feminism and the body: The visible and the invisible in consumer research, Joy & Venkatesh, 1994).
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
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1 comments:
Thanks for the response to my questions. I think your research is really interesting and I enjoyed your presentation. I think I was curious about the alt websites because I find, as you said, there are girls who portray these 'burlesque' codes. This speaks to the pervasiveness and popularity of this feminine aesthetic. I thought it was interesting that you differntiated between naive and subversive burlesquers because these categories clarified how we might situate a popular aesthetic or fashion within and around a subculture.
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