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TYPE: Article CC:CCG JOURNAL TITLE: Celebrity studies USER JOURNAL TITLE: Celebrity Studies ARTICLE TITLE: The trouble with Tim: historicising the male body in female celebrity ARTICLE AUTHOR: VOLUME: 6 ISSUE: 1 MONTH: YEAR: 2015 PAGES: 258-260 ISSN: 1939-2397 OCLC #:

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ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20

The trouble with Tim: historicising the male body in female celebrity

Mara Dauphin

To cite this article: Mara Dauphin (2015) The trouble with Tim: historicising the male body in female celebrity, Celebrity Studies, 6:2, 258-260, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2015.1029756

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1029756

Published online: 07 Apr 2015.

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Download by: [Swarthmore College] Date: 04 November 2015, At: 11:46 Celebrity Studies, 2015 Vol. 6, No. 2, 258–260, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1029756

FORUM The trouble with Tim: historicising the male body in female celebrity Mara Dauphin*

American Studies Department, The George Washington University, 2108 G St NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA (Received 27 October 2014; accepted 16 February 2015)

In February 2014, Project Runway (2004–2014) mentor, chief creative officer at Liz Claiborne, fashion celebrity, and outspoken LGBT advocate Tim Gunn made headlines in the fashion and LGBT press by expressing ambivalence towards the growing trend of using androgynous male or transgender models for womenswear fashion shows. In an interview with The Huffington Post (Adams 2014), Gunn confessed to being uneasy with the ways in which having models with masculine bone structures walk in women’s clothes reinforces an unrealistically narrow, hipless frame as the ideal of feminine beauty. ‘It underscores all of those body issues that we know women have’, Gunn said. In this piece, I seek not only to respond to Gunn’s comments, but also to point to a history of non-female-bodied feminine performance that helps us understand female celebrity in twentieth-century America. In his comments, Gunn goes beyond a mere transphobic reaction to a performed violation of the ‘truth’ of the female body, rooting his concern instead in the mimetic function of women’s fashion and the material ways in which popular culture’s representa- tions of women’s bodies shape their female audience’s real or imagined corporeal possibilities. For the moment, we will take seriously the claim that representations of femininity in high fashion shows constitute an important part of the popular archive of femininity from which its audience members assemble their gender presentations. We must then also acknowledge that the contributions of transgender, androgynous, and drag queen models to this archive do not bear a unique relationship to fantasy or the ‘unach- ievable’ within the women’s fashion industry. Female audience members’ expectations of their ability to mimic the feminine embodiment of a female high fashion model like Kate Moss could be just as easily disappointed as their expectations of mimicking the feminine Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 11:46 04 November 2015 embodiment of Andreja Pejic or Willam Belli.1 Here, transgender, androgynous, and drag queen models, as symbols of ‘imitation’ that do not require a recognition of all gender as performative, serve as the collective scapegoat for public anxieties over the creation and ultimate failure of strong mimetic desire upon which the economy of women’s fashion is based.2 Their role as scapegoat in the contemporary moment, however, falsely casts the con- tributions of bodies sexed as male to the available archive of femininity as a modern rupture of a discrete world of female embodiment and representation. At their core, Gunn’s remarks assume a history of female representation in popular culture that had, until the recent development of transgender, androgynous, and drag queen models walking for high fashion houses, been rooted entirely in biologically female embodiments of femininity. However,

*Email: [email protected]

© 2015 Taylor & Francis Celebrity Studies 259

the presence of bodies sexed as male on contemporary womenswear runways marks the historic and continuous influence of the ‘male’ body (as exhibited either by the cisgender drag queen/female impersonator or by the transwoman or gender-non-conforming person whom the public eye misgenders) on mass culture representations of femininity. Female representation was often linked to imitative practices, for example, when female impersonation was a regular staple of American vaudeville entertainment. Before the full-scale dominance of the motion picture industry in American entertainment, vaudeville circuits toured America, performing in cities both big and small with a variety of acts that usually included dancers, acrobats, clowns or comedians, animal acts, children’s choirs, singers, short movies, minstrels, and female impersonators. Female impersonation was, at the turn of the twentieth century, as likely as any of these talents to lead to national stardom, and its place in popular culture significantly shaped how the female body and its ‘authenticity’ would be legible in the entertainment industry. Even after the decline of vaudeville, famous female impersonator Julian Eltinge went on to perform female character roles in silent movies with big-name celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. Unlike some of his bawdier predecessors (such as Bert Savoy and George Fortescue), Eltinge identified as a female illusionist and crafted his feminine appearance very carefully (Hamilton 1997). His act was not so much to lampoon the trappings of femininity, but to uncannily imitate them. As a performer, Eltinge was able to tap into and help craft a growing discourse of what women meant to the new film industry. Eltinge participated in the transposition of stage spectacle onto the screen. This spectacular femininity of the vaudeville stage continued to influence stars who moved between the stage and film, such as international dance sensation Josephine Baker, burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, and playwright and actress Mae West, famous for her forward attitude and ostentatious display of diamonds both on and off the screen. In many ways, the stories of these early Hollywood female celebrities mirror those of impersonators like Eltinge and Savoy. Beginning her vaudeville career in 1907 at the age of 14, West worked initially as a minstrel and as a ‘cooch dancer’, much as Savoy did (Hamilton 1997). Similarly, Lee spent her childhood in small-time circuits with her mother and younger sister, the actress June Havoc. Since both West and Lee would rise to fame by exquisitely showcasing their feminine bodies and a teasing wit, it is worth thinking about how this mastery was affected by long and formative childhood stints in a vaudeville world in which femininity was always imitated and rarely tied to biology or nature. As vaudeville troupes travelled together, children of vaudeville would have been in close contact with the touring female impersonators, and in many cases they credited

Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 11:46 04 November 2015 impersonators with perfecting certain aspects of their performance of femininity. In Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoirs, for example, she recalls her mother learning stage make-up tricks from leading female impersonator Francis Renault (Lee 1957). Indeed, female impersonators were often the models of feminine stage success that such girls worked towards. The bawdy Bert Savoy was often credited with inspiring much of Mae West’s comportment, from her walk to her aggressive signature line, ‘Why don’t you come up some time and see me?’, probably styled after Savoy’s comedic routine ‘You must come over!’. With female impersonation as a primer for feminine performance, girls like West and Lee not only used technologies of femininity perfected by impersonators (such as make-up angles, wigs, hairstyles, and body-shaping garments), but they crafted their stage and screen personae in the same ways that female impersonators might. For example, the outlandish and lavishly-dressed characters West created in plays and movies (such as Diamond Lil) were not only aesthetically similar to Eltinge’s femininity of feathers and diamonds, but were similarly performed as artifice and performance itself. In many ways, these layers 260 M. Dauphin

function in the same way as does a female impersonator’s clothing, which always invites the audience’s eye to peel off the layers and unwrap something authentic. By recovering the centrality of artifice to much feminine performance, analysis of West’s celebrity not only provides evidence for the productive influence of bodies not sexed as female upon feminine performance, but also rejects the assumption that the female body and representations thereof are uniquely natural or expressive of a gendered truth. Femininity here is not only always imitative, as Judith Butler argues all gender is, but its imitation is also the product of the performances of differently sexed and gendered bodies throughout history.3 If we consider this example of the imbrication of non-female-bodied performance of femininity within the popular archive of spectacular femininity, then the participation of bodies not sexed as female in the present-day spectacularisation of the feminine that takes place on the runways of fashion weeks represents a continuous, rather than anomalous, inclusion of skeletal structures sexed as male, even though fashionable body types or gender politics may have changed. (West and Lee were famously voluptuous, for example.) Including bodies not sexed as female in the historical archive of femininity may not sufficiently answer the concerns Gunn expressed over female body image. Still, it reveals at least that the influence of bodies not sexed as female on feminine representation is not merely a product of postmodern gender politics, but deeply embedded within a history of spectacular femininity. Further study of the imbrication of the feminine performance of both bodies sexed as female and bodies not sexed as female will reveal how politics of gender, sexuality, media, and celebrity have contoured this history.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes 1. Pejic is a transgender model whose rise in high fashion as an androgynous male model predated her transition in early 2014. Belli is a popular American drag queen who rose to fame as a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2012) and walked the runway for Betsey Johnson in the Spring 2014 New York Fashion Week. 2. For a more thorough description of mimesis, see Williams (2008). 3. For foundational discussions of gender as performative and imitative, see Butler (1990).

Notes on contributor Mara Dauphin is a PhD student in the American Studies department at George Washington

Downloaded by [Swarthmore College] at 11:46 04 November 2015 University in Washington, DC. Her research centres on the history of twentieth-century American gender and sexuality, with particular attention both to practices of gender performance and to the history of gender ‘imitation’.

References Adams, R., 2014. Tim Gunn on transgender models, his sexuality & finding role models. The Huffington Post, 24 February. Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/24/tim- gunn-transgender-models_n_4830882.html [Accessed 12 September 2014]. Butler, J., 1990. Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Hamilton, M., 1997. When I’m bad, I’m better: Mae West, sex, and American entertainment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lee, G.R., 1957. Gypsy: memoirs of America’s most celebrated stripper. New York: Harper. Project runway, 2004–2014. TV, Bravo Cable, Lifetime Television. RuPaul’s drag race, 2012. TV, World of Wonder. Season 4. Williams, L., 2008. Screening sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.