Kathleen Casey's The Prettiest Girl On Stage

Kathleen Casey’s The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville kind of brings this essay full circle with its exploration of the adoption of gender and racial performances in American vaudeville, a popular form of entertainment during the early twentieth century. Vaudeville performances are characterized by physical humor, masquerade, and metamorphosis. This particular type of performance is not much different than “camp” explored in Newton’s Mother Camp, which emphasizes gay humor and theatrics. While camp is performed by drag queens, the vaudeville performers explored in Casey’s work perform gender in different ways. One of the four case studies in the book is that of Eva Tanguay who embodies female

masculinity much like Halberstam’s subjects. Tanguay rejects the notion of Victorian expectations of white womanhood. Not only does Tanguay perform gender, but Casey considers her to be a race bender. Unlike many performers during the early twentieth century, Tanguay did not wear blackface or adopt black vernacular her race bending is evident in her afro-like hair and in performances in which she represents primitive and stereotypical depictions of non-white people. Casey asserts, “She tapped into contemporary racial undercurrents through her self-representation as an animalistic, savage, pseudo-primitive who was emotionally and sexually volatile.” Tanguay used the stage to prove that her masculinity that white women can personify masculinity better than their white male counterparts.
Unlike Tanguay, Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator, used the stage to (re)present images of white Victorian womanhood thus demonstrating that notions of whiteness are gendered.

What sets Eltinge a part from other female impersonators such as those in Newton’s work is his refusal to incorporate camp into stage routines nor did he change his voice. Casey posits that rather than campy performances, Eltinge’s stage performances conjures up thoughts of drag balls like those in New York City, more specifically Harlem and Greenwich Village. While he had the opportunity to be apart of this subculture, he refused since he was at risk of being a fairy, something he tried to avoid. According to George Chauncey, fairies performed femininity through cultural strategies such as mimicking female voices and gaits. While his onstage persona is a female impersonator, Eltinge’s off-stage masculine mannerisms ensured that he would not be seen or defined as a fairy. His performance of white womanhood is exemplified in not only in style of dress, which included heavy, floor length gowns but also wear whitening powder on his face. His performances in white facial powder helped him to become an entrepreneur selling whitening powder, cold cream, and publishing a magazine targeted for women offering fashion tips for women wanting to imitate his version of white womanhood. Casey concludes that instead of his female impersonations being seen as mocking women, his performances were instead viewed as

“exalting, scrutinizing, and fetishizing” womanhood for everyone, especially white women.
Lillyn Brown, a biracial woman performed race differently than Eltinge.

Her performance included portraying a black dandy singing about the past of the Antebellum south as a black male impersonator. During the era of Jim Crow, performing as a male impersonator provided Brown with opportunities to (re)present new notions of black manhood. Casey argues that being black at the turn of the century was “limiting” but being black allowed Brown to “’transgress gender boundaries on the stage.” Unlike Eltinge who did not change his voice on stage, Brown need to sound as masculine as possible to keep up with the men she performed with and to convince audiences to buy into her brand of masculinity. It also allowed her to show her true self. She would reveal her waist length hair on stage to show her femininity. Hair length is a power symbol of gender and sexuality. Brown’s mixed heritage did not always speak to her blackness but her hair texture was an important racial indicator that spoke to her race in ways that her coloring and features did not. Her hair was also important to her femininity since she did not intend to be a male impersonator all of the time. The revealing of her long hair was also important to her performance, it was the highlight. This allowed Brown to shed her masculinity and unveil her true self. In these moments, Brown and her audiences understood the sexual and gendered implications of hair. Brown, like many other male impersonators, reveal their feminine

physiques through fitted men’s clothing. While hair reveals were the climax of her performance, her men’s clothing was the most important part of her dandy act. For black male impersonators, the black male dandy was critical in the discourse of race and gender during a time in which white performers in black face portrayed blacks in stereotypical ways. As a black woman, her performance of black manhood sought to undermine degrading white performances.
While she was not a gender impersonator, Sophie Tucker, a Jewish white woman, performed her visions of race and gender in black face while adapting a “colored voice” or black dialect. Similar to Tanguay, Tucker rejected notion of Victorian expectations of white womanhood when at the age of nineteen she left her husband and left home to pursue a career on stage in New York City. Her performance of race was stressed through “coon shouting,” a loud vocal technique popularized by Jewish women vaudevillians at the turn of the century. Tucker played up her racial bending by stressing that she had no formal training in this performance technique. While coon shouting was central to her performance, black face was also apart of her act. She initially rejected black face claiming that while she wanted to perform the sounds of blackness she did not want to look black. Tucker and many fair-skinned entertainers felt that blackface “destroyed [their] femininity.” While Tucker felt this way, performing race gave way to gender performance. She became a popular entertainer making enough money to buy her parents and new home and put her brother through law school. In her mind, this put her in a patriarchal position. Like Tanguay, female masculinity was embodied in wealth, physical appearance, and authority. While hair revealing was Brown’s performance highlights, revealing skin color was Tucker’s. For Tucker, it was difficult to prove to audiences that she was not a Southern black woman, however they were convinced once she removed her gloves, revealing white skin. Whereas Brown’s figure was viewed as feminine, Tucker’s larger frame seen as “big and ugly” helped with the performance because it matched her robust coon shouting. Since Victorian notions of white womanhood deemed that discussions of sex were inappropriate, Tucker’s physique also helped her articulate sex in ways that also rejected these ideas.
Since the mid to late twentieth century, researchers have had a keen interest in the lives of gender nonconforming individuals. Their research has revealed many aspects of the lives of such people. The numerous works produced has demonstrated that there is so much to (re)cover in this particular field. Such recoveries are reflected in differences in drag performers, gender identities, sexual identities, and queer culture. These differences are highlighted also as studies become more specialized and researchers focus specifically on states, cities, urban, and rural communities. The vast majority of the work already done on this field, focus mainly on white gender nonconforming individuals. The works discussed in this historiographical essay leave much room for discussions of race and gender nonconformity. Beyond George Chauncey’s discussion of drag balls in urban black communities and Marlon Bailey’s discussion of ballroom culture in Detroit, very little attention is given to race within this particular field.
There are many opportunities to explore race and gender nonconforming individuals. Scholars could give a broad overview of the history of black transgender people. Additionally, scholars could include biographies of lesser known transgender activists such as Lucy Hicks Anderson, Miss Major Griffin Gracy, Marsha P. Johnson, Sir Lady Java, and Sylvia Rivera. Works on Johnson and Rivera would help to bring color back into the narrative of the Stonewall riots. There also needs to be more regional studies especially in places where there has been and continues to have a decent population of gay black men and women like Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago. Another area that scholars should consider is the prison industrial complex since mass incarceration disproportionately affects black and brown people. For gender nonconforming individuals, the prison industrial complex brings many more issues such as violence, poverty, and homelessness. While this essay calls out the lack of inclusion of race in these works, much credit is given to them for providing a foundation for future works to build upon. These works discussed in this essay demonstrate the necessity of more inclusive studies of race in the field.