Fabulous Femininities: Extravagant Costume and Transformative Thresholds

Fabulous Femininities will seek to understand the way that resistant feminine identities are performed by burlesque club-goers via specific DIY approaches to costume. The ethnographic study will focus on a range of participants who identify as women (biologically born women and male to female transsexual woman) in order to document, understand and theorize the transformative threshold between the everyday self and the extravagant spectacle. The project will explore this transformative element of costume in order to understand the way costume performs and politicizes alternative embodied versions of 'womanhood'.

It is timely to undertake this exploration as the category of 'woman' has been significantly challenged in recent years with trans people becoming more visible and central to cultural debates. Both popular Second Wave and Fourth Wave feminists who deny that trans women are 'real' women have been vociferously challenged as transphobic, regressive and intolerant (Finlayson, Jenkins, Worsdale 2018; Pearce 2018)

The burlesque club is a socially sensitive and aware space that encourages a conscious and accepting attitude to this change, with many club night and event organizers insisting on unisex toilets and changing facilities as well as wheelchair accessible venues. The heightened subcultural space, enables the clubbers to transform into more expansive notions of what constitutes 'woman' via feminized costume. The significance of this research lies in giving a platform to the way that marginalized women in the UK are reacting and responding to this societal gendered shift from the grassroots level up. This will prompt us to reinvigorate more open, tolerant thinking about the possibilities for femininity and the female body at large.

It is important that this theme is explored because 'self-narrative' or 'self-construction' as Mason-Schrock argues in relation to transsexuals, are not just about revealing the pre-existing self but also about bringing 'phenomenologically real "true selves"' into being (1996). Feminine dress and styling of the body allows the male to female transgender community for instance to feel 'at home'; and in contemporary debate there has been a strong push for acceptance of this as a human rights issue. However, there is an urgent need to understand and address exactly how the feminine accessories performatively work to that end - how do items of feminine dress enable this?

The performance of spectacular femininity facilitates the process of feeling at home on three levels. Firstly, within a subcultural community the person feels at home as a collective outsider - this is a safe zone where alter egos can be expressed theatrically and femininity can be personalized. Secondly, there is a sense of being an outsider and excluded from femininity itself which has been harnessed and straitjacketed by the requirements of heteronormativity. 'Straight' cisgendered women (women who feel that their gender identity matches their sex as assigned at birth) find themselves squeezed out of any right to cultural resistance because it is persistently taken as read that they are normalcy and privilege itself (Willson and McCartney: 2017). Exploring DIY approaches to costume in subcultural spaces will give us a better understanding of feminine costume's role in fashioning and magnifying 'othered' subversive female identities.

Costume performs and politicizes belonging with extravagant accessories operating as a linchpin - threshold - between imaginative and real topographies; between subcultural/minority scenes, spaces and sites and mainstream spaces of heterosexuality and 'womanhood'. This project seeks to understand the way in which this process performs both a psychological and social need and a political desire for democratic representational freedoms.

1. New Audiences and New Venues
a. The research will give validity to burlesque entertainment as an art form and industry. As a bastardized form, burlesque is still not taken seriously by the wider theatre industry. It is still 'low' entertainment. Burlesque producers will benefit by being given more respect for what they do and as such be able to entertain at a wider range of theatre outlets.

b. The burlesque community can use the archive as a promotional tool, sending the archive link when emailing new venues or new audiences for their burlesque schools and academies. It could also be used as a resource for their mentoring schemes.

2. The Burlesque Industry and Community
The digital archive will cohesively bring together a sense of where the industry is at now. The industry is at a watershed moment where important debates around the new possibilities for imaging womanhood are becoming markedly pronounced. The archive and symposium will showcase the community's use of costume and create a platform for debate around issues of diversity and acceptance.

3. Affiliated Creative Industries
a. Burlesque performers are also brand ambassadors. They have sponsors who they support by modelling brands and being photographed for alternative (fetish/tattoo etc.) publications. Sponsors such as Kiss Me Deadly, What Katie Did, Made in Brixton and Little Black Pants Club will benefit from the promotion.

b. The research will have an impact on the wider image-making industry (photographers, studios, set design, costume-makers and designers, make-up artistes and cosmetic industry). Burlesque consumers and the wider public don't just want 'selfies', they want other innovative pro-woman images. Companies who use positive inclusive images of burlesque performers, such the ethical brand Made in Brixton, or the pro-black femininities blogger Cora Harrington,'s blog, 'The Lingerie Addict', will also benefit by spotlighting their issue-centred brands.

4. Marginal Groups
a. This research and archive will also create a model that will benefit other marginalized communities who radically use theatrical costume such as drag, cosplay, goth and LGBT+ groups. It will enable a wider understanding of the significance of costume to belonging and citizenship.

b. The research will also impact on subgroups within the targeted subcultural communities. The archive will create a new platform for recognition for male-to-female trans people, disability, ageing women, lesbian, +sized bodies, tattooed bodies as a part of a new embodied fashioning of womanhood. The research will therefore have an impact in terms of diversity and equality.

5. Governing Body
There is no cohesive governing body at present within the burlesque industry - no policy making body who has authority regarding the regulation and protection of the industry. The community is in the stages of discussing this issue with a meeting planned for 2019. If an authoritative platform were to be set up, debates pertinent to burlesque spaces, such as the inclusion of transwomen or 'cultural appropriation' could be rigorously discussed. This proposed research project will be at the heart of the implementation process.

6. Campaigners
a. The proposed project will impact on Nightlife campaigning eg. #SaveNightSpaces and the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA). Many safe space for women's radical performance such as Madam Jo Jos have been closed down. The research will demonstrate the importance of maintaining night time spaces for women.

b. It will also impact on Safe space campaigning, A Women's Night Safety charter to combat harassment is being compiled by Amy Lamé and the Women and Equalities Committee are pushing for action to be taken against street harassment. The government has pledged to eliminate sexual harassment of women and girls by 2030. The proposed research into 'safe' and intolerant public spaces will seek to support these campaigns.