Recommended Reading

A provocative and illuminating exploration of the meaning of burlesque in American culture. Allen takes a seemingly marginal, degraded, and little-understood theatrical form and asks why and how it came to be so. 

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Thriftbooks | UNC Press

Slipping behind the scene, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind undresses the issues of feminism, modern popularity, and what exactly draws the unique and varied audience members to the shows.  

 ABE Books| Amazon  | Thriftbooks

In Creating Carmen Miranda, Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez takes the reader through the myriad methods Miranda consciously used to shape her performance of race, gender, and camp culture 

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Thriftbooks | Vanderbuilt University Press

Remembering the time when burlesque was a larger theatrical arena including chorus lines, live music, and comedy, BURLESQUE: Legendary Stars of the Stage captures the spirit of this unique art form through hundreds of photographs, interviews, and stories. 

Amazon | Bookshop.org |  Strand Books

Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism.

Amazon | Bookshop.org | City Lights | Duke University Press 

The authors examine the idea of revolutionary nostalgia through neo-burlesque in France, Britain, the US, and elsewhere, and its rebellious feminism, as well as its context of consumer culture. 

Amazon | Blackwell's | Bookshop.org 

A lush combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this book develops ideas about the erotic, beauty, older women, sex, and pleasure.

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Thriftbooks | University of California Press

The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette. 

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Cambridge University Press | Thriftbooks

Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society--once Boston's unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society's upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays. 

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Bookshop.org | Penguin

The name "Minsky" was synonymous with burlesque in New York between the years 1912 and 1937. The youngest of the four original Minsky brothers gives a first-person account of this heyday of burlesque with humor and verve.  

Amazon | Thriftbooks

While cinematic depictions of women and minorities have seemingly improved, a century of representing brown women as natural dancers has popularized the notion that Latinas are inherently passionate and promiscuous. Yet some Latina actresses became stars by embracing and manipulating these stereotypical fantasies. 

ABE Books | Amazon | Bookshop.org |  Rutgers University

Revealing how twenty-first century neo-burlesque is in constant dialogue with the classic burlesque of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she considers how today’s performers use camp to comment on preconceived notions of femininity. She also explores how the striptease performer directs the audience’s gaze, putting on layers of meaning while taking off layers of clothing.  

Amazon | Bookshop.org |  Thriftbooks

A chronicle of the coalescence of Black vaudeville and how T.O.B.A. helped establish and nurture the initial flowering of what became the incalculably influential Black entertainment industry 

Amazon | Bookshop.org | University of Illinois Press

Rachel Shteir brings to life striptease's Golden Age, the years between the Jazz Age and the Sexual Revolution, when strippers performed around the country, in burlesque theatres, nightclubs, vaudeville houses, carnivals, fairs, and even in glorious palaces on the Great White Way.  

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Oxford University Press | Thriftbooks

A chronicle of the rise and fall of vaudeville in America, from the early minstrel shows and showboats to the emergence (and decline) of Broadway's Palace Theater as the Mecca of the entertainment industry.  

Amazon | Thriftbooks

Every year in downtown Las Vegas, often called "Old Vegas," The Burlesque Hall of Fame reunion brings together members of the League of Exotic Dancers, one of the earliest unions for women in exotic entertainment. Through a range of experiences - from discussing struggles for wage equality, to helping stabilize an 85 year old as she steps into a sequined g-string - the authors describe the complexity of the lives of these performers and the burlesque history from which they come.  

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Oxford University Press | Thriftbooks

This book documents the rich history and cultural legacy of our country's only purely indigenous theatrical form, including its influence on everything from USO shows to Ed Sullivan to The Muppet Show and The Gong Show, as well as the network of fire-eaters, human blockheads, burlesque performers, and bad comics intent on taking vaudeville into its second century. 

Amazon | Bookshop.org | MacMillan | Thriftbooks

The Burlesque Handbook is the essential manual to understanding and performing both classic and neo-burlesque. Written by Jo Weldon, award-winning founder of the New York School of Burlesque, this book features easy-to-follow suggestions and exercises for developing stage-worthy confidence, presence, and sexiness. You'll learn about the fabulous makeup, costumes—including pasties!—moves, grooves, and attitudes of burlesque.  

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Zemeckis assembles an impressive number of surviving performers from roughly the 1930s through the late ’50s to recount their experiences toiling in this often misunderstood cul-de-sac in American performing arts.  

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Thriftbooks

Fascinating and page–turning dive into the lives of Bacon and Rand . . . A meticulous, behind–the–scenes analysis into the intersection of show–business and femininity in post–Depression America  

Amazon | Bookshop.org | Penguin | Thriftbooks