On a recent weeknight at G Boutique, a Bucktown lingerie shop and sex-toy emporium, Rachel Shteir, associate professor and head of the dramaturgy and dramatic criticism program at DePaul, was dressed in patent leather heels and lacy black stockings, a red bra winking out from underneath her camisole and bright teal blazer. She was there to sign copies of her first book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, before Michelle “Toots” L’amour’s monthly burlesque workshop, which that night would draw about 15 women looking to pick up a few moves. The workshop’s popularity and the booming interest in burlesque at large might suggest that Shteir has slipped into a well-lubed market, but her book’s actually been in the works for 15 years, none of them spent undressing onstage. “I’m a writer, not a doer,” she said, and explained that she couldn’t stay for the workshop, as she had to get to an interview she was doing for an article she’s working on for Playboy–about strippers, natch.
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Shteir got interested in stripping in 1990, while she was doing graduate work at the Yale School of Drama, when she visited a New Haven strip club, a small, dark, “really skanky” joint with a pool table. She went to see an acquaintance known variously as Jane, Wendy, and Wednesday, who had started stripping on the side and soon would drop out of school to strip full-time. Shteir shared Jane’s upper-middle-class background and was intrigued by her decision to swap an academic lifestyle for the chance to take off her clothes onstage. The club’s sole female patron, she felt nervous and conspicuous that night, but it wouldn’t be her last trip.
“I never thought the burlesque thing would turn into anything,” she says. “But it seemed like there would be a place for it on the shelf. When you went to the bookstore to look under ‘History of Striptease,’ there was nothing there!” Striptease, published in October by Oxford University Press, is the first comprehensive history of the genre–though Jessica Glasscock’s briefer study, Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight, was published in 2003, and Michelle Baldwin’s chronicle of the form’s revival, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind, came out earlier last year.
And yet, Striptease isn’t a glossy paean to the triumphs of strong-minded women. Reinvention of any sort, as a stripper or otherwise, doesn’t guarantee self-improvement, despite what the popular myth might have us believe, and to her credit the author never pretends otherwise. “I try really hard not to romanticize their lives,” she says.
