The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man

Historians of U.S. vaudeville, musical comedy, and other early twentieth-century popular entertainment have offered lively accounts of performers who negotiated, undermined, and exploited stereotypes of gender, race, class, and sexuality in their onstage and offstage appearances. Yet surprisingly few scholars have examined the complex entanglements of race and gender in such acts. Kathleen B. Casey skillfully addresses this oversight, foregrounding the intersectionality of race and gender in the careers of four performers—Eva Tanguay, Julian Eltinge, Lillyan Brown, and Sophie Tucker—who dominated the vaudeville stage between 1900 and 1930. In each chapter, Casey charts the career of an individual artist, detailing her or his race- and gender-bending performances through inventive readings of newspaper reviews, promotional articles, memoirs, advertisements, photographs, sheet music, and audio recordings. Casey begins with Tanguay, an electrifying performer who thrilled audiences with her flashy costumes, untamed hair, dynamic personality, and unapologetic projection of “animalistic savagery” (p. 3). Through her demonstrated strength and active life-style, Tanguay epitomized the ideal “strenuous life” that Theodore Roosevelt had recommended to U.S. men, fiercely rejecting the passivity that signified white femininity. At the same time, her association with animals and primitive imagery through costumes, song lyrics, and publicity photographs stressed her savage qualities, drawing implicit connections to stereotypical representations of nonwhite men and women. In chapter 2, Casey turns to Eltinge, a female impersonator who projected ideals of white femininity onstage, while affirming his hearty masculinity offstage through an emphasis on the intensive labor involved in his transformation from a burly man into a Victorian maiden. While previous studies of Eltinge have called attention to the actor's strategic celebration of gender binaries, Casey complicates this work by demonstrating how Eltinge's use of makeup also supported the equation of whiteness with femininity

Aesthetics · Art · Comedy · Drama · Femininity · Human sexuality · Literature · Masculinity · Musical · Performative utterance · Performing arts · Race (biology · Sociology · White (mutation · American Sports and Literature · Gender Studies · History · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity

  Jason Arday•Whiteness and Education•2018

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