Product Details

The Washington Post - Elaine Showalter

Shteir discovered the girlie show as an academic subject when she was a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, and she has continued intensive research in the Sally Rand Archives in Chicago, the Harold Minsky Collection in Las Vegas and the Gypsy Rose Lee papers in New York. Her book is packed with historical detail and contemporary feminist insights.

Publishers Weekly

"A distinctly American diversion that flourished from the Jazz Age to the era of the Sexual Revolution," striptease emerges as closer kin to vaudeville than pornography in this engaging if sometimes overly detailed survey. Shteir, head of the department of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at DePaul University, offers fascinating details about stripper subculture, past and present, and includes numerous photographs of and quotes from stripping's famous practitioners, such as Gypsy Rose Lee. Readers will learn about "horizontal cootching" and fan dances; the use of trained animals in acts at the 1939 World's Fair ("doves peel her," wrote a Variety columnist of stripper Rosita Royce); the conflicts between big-name strippers and their "cheap" burlesque counterparts; the 1962 federal crackdown on organized crime that dealt a grave blow to striptease. Shteir reaches, throughout, for a larger cultural meaning in the girlie show, and the paradox of stripping's possibilities-it offered women a shot at independence but required them to sell themselves as spectacle to do it-is familiar but still intriguing. The gender politics and cultural theory she employs as analytical tools may limit her audience to those already well versed in such ideas, but Shteir's discussions of the ways that striptease informed American culture and her careful descriptions of the women and their milieu are bright moments. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A mind-numbingly detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of a ribald form of popular entertainment that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. Shteir (Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism/DePaul Univ. Theatre School) begins her extensively researched study with an examination of striptease's 19th-century antecedents in tableaux vivants, which featured naked or semi-naked women posing as statues or figures from paintings. The real story, however, begins when posing undressed turned into undressing seductively in burlesque theaters, vaudeville houses, nightclubs, carnivals, and fairs across the country. Shteir ties the rise of striptease to the rise of the sexually liberated New Woman in the Jazz Age. This rebellion against the confines of Victorian prudery did not go unchallenged; the author describes struggles between theater owners and various anti-vice reformers who tried to shut them down. The text is packed with lengthy descriptions of various strippers' costumes, props, and routines, including even the lyrics to the songs they sang; the abundant illustrations include photos of such well-known artistes as Gypsy Rose Lee, Sally Rand, Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, and Candy Barr, as well as many lesser-known peelers. The author also examines these women's private lives in an attempt to discover who they were and why they became strippers. She cites a variety of factors for the decline of striptease: audiences lost to TV, federal investigations into organized crime, the changing roles of women in society, the rise of the pornography industry. By 1969, which Shteir pinpoints as the year of its demise, the Sexual Revolution had so changed how Americans thought about nuditythat striptease's once-glamorous stars seemed downright old-fashioned. Its golden era may have long since ended, but the author asserts that striptease will continue to command our attention as long as the promise of sex is more alluring than the reality. Nuggets of fascinating lore lie buried in mounds of dull prose. (50 b&w illustrations)