Description
In this lively and enlightening study, Kathleen B. Casey explores the ways in which the gender- and race-bending spectacles of vaudeville dramatized the economic, technological, social, and cultural upheaval that gripped the United States in the early twentieth century. She focuses on four key performers. Eva Tanguay, known as "The I Don't Care Girl," was loved for her defiance of Victorian decorum, linking white womanliness to animalistic savagery at a time when racial and gender ideologies were undergoing significant reconstruction. In contrast, Julian Eltinge, the era's foremost female impersonator, used race to exaggerate notions of manliness and femininity in a way that reinforced traditional norms more than it undermined them. Lillyn Brown, a biracial woman who portrayed a cosmopolitan black male dandy while singing about an antebellum southern past, offered her audiences, black and white, starkly different visual and aural messages about race and gender. Finally, Sophie Tucker, who often performed in blackface during the early years of her long and heralded career, strategically played with prevailing ideologies by alternately portraying herself as white, Jewish, black, manly, and womanly, while managing, remarkably, to convince audiences that these identities could coexist within one body.
Analyzing a wide assortment of primary materials-advertisements, recordings, lyrics, sheet music, costumes, photographs, reviews, and press accounts from the era-Casey looks not only at gender and racial impersonation but also at how spectators reacted to these performances.
About the Author
Kathleen B. Casey is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College, USA.
Reviews
In this highly readable book, Kathleen Casey makes an important intervention into the study of early-twentieth-century American vaudeville and some of its most infamous stars. She pinpoints the blind spot in current scholarship by demonstrating how race as much as gender charges the meanings in vaudeville performance." -Linda Mizejewski, author of Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics and Ziegfeld Girl
Book Information
ISBN 9781621901655
Author Kathleen B. Casey
Format Hardback
Page Count 277
Imprint University of Tennessee Press
Publisher University of Tennessee Press
Weight(grams) 480g