The Paradox of the Striptease, Describing the Costumes As

Criticism

Volume 55 | Issue 3 Article 7

2013 The aP radox Of The trS iptease Benjamin Kahn Louisiana State University

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Recommended Citation Kahn, Benjamin (2013) "The aP radox Of The trS iptease," Criticism: Vol. 55: Iss. 3, Article 7. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol55/iss3/7 The Paradox of Roland Barthes opens his essay “Striptease” in Mythologies with the the Striptease following observation: “Striptease— Benjamin Kahan at least Parisian striptease—is based on a contradiction: Woman is desex- Second Skin: Josephine Baker ualized at the very moment when and the Modern Surface by Anne she is stripped naked.”1 In his elabo- Anlin Cheng. Oxford: Oxford ration of this initial claim, Barthes University Press, 2011. Pp. 256. sets out in two directions. He con- $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. tinues to develop the paradox of the striptease, describing the costumes as

establishing the woman right from the start as an object in disguise. The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light a hid- den depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh.2

But this “natural” and “perfectly chaste state” that animates the striptease is difficult to square with Barthes’s contention shortly there- after that “feathers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their magical virtue even once re- moved, and give her something like the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell.”3 It is this latter genealogy of displayed skin infused by its coverings that Anne Cheng’s Second Skin so brilliantly unfolds to circumvent the contradiction at the heart of the striptease.

That Cheng’s book is an impor- This explication comes in par- tant one for scholarship on Baker ticular in chapters 3–5; these chap- and architectural theory (especially ters power the theoretical and on Adolf Loos) goes without say- conceptual engine of Cheng’s text. ing. Because of its critical subtlety Chapter 3, “Skins, Tattoos, and the and the light touch of its enormous Lure of the Surface,” magisterially powers of synthesis, however, it traces a genealogy of the racialized might be easy to miss that this is a history of the white wall that runs monumental work of scholarship, from Gottfried Semper to Adolf making major interventions into Loos to Le Corbusier and contin- critical race theory and modernist ues to operate as an unspoken de- studies. Chapter 2 (the introduction fault in so many apartments and is chapter 1) centers on the primal houses today. In order to recover scene of primitivist modernism: the meanings of this modern sur- Pablo Picasso’s visit to the Troca- face, Cheng locates an animating déro museum in Paris. Juxtaposing tension in Loos’s work. Famously this scene with Baker’s legendary in “Ornament and Crime” (1908), 1925 Parisian performance, Cheng Loos rejects ornamentation, com- deploys “Baker as a dynamic ful- paring it to “the [childish and crum through which” to reread amoral] tattoos of the Papuan” in Picasso’s encounter with African order to theorize what Cheng calls art (4). In particular, Cheng seizes “the ideal of the denuded modern on the “categorical confusion” that surface” (24). However, in his essay Baker inspired (the manifest inabil- “The Principle of Cladding” (1898), ity to decide whether she was black/ Loos writes, white, woman/other, delicious/hor- rible, human/animal, etc.) in order In the beginning was clad- to open out a similar failure in the ding [Bekleidung]. . . . The Trocadéro of modernist primitiv- covering is the oldest archi- ism “to inscribe its own passions” tectural detail. Originally (5). In putting “the negrophilia” it was made out of animal (14) of modernist primitivism in di- skins or textile products. This alogue with a history of the modern meaning of the word [Decke] surface, Cheng asks “is skin—and is still known today in the its visibility—so available?” (7). German languages. Then This question effects a shift in our the covering had to be put up understanding of race from being, somewhere if it were to af- in Franz Fanon’s phrase an “epi- ford enough shelter. . . . Thus dermal schema,” to being a mode the walls were added. . . . of seeing, one that Cheng unpacks [But] cladding is even older throughout her book. than structure. (23) on second skin 517

This opens the conundrum, “what both, this chapter explores the ways distinguishes cladding from orna- in which nakedness “confounds” mentation?” (28). With this pro- imperial logics (37). Cheng reads vocative question, Cheng unlocks “Baker’s relentless self-fetishiza- an alternative history of primitivist tion” as enabling us to see the fail- modernism—a history that shifts ure of “the translation between the terrain away from the dichot- racial and sexual fetishism” (46). omy of desire and repression to- While the sexual fetish “functions ward the simultaneous operation of for heterosexual men as a kind of these forces. Reading the bedroom psychical lubricant in the face of that Loos designed for his second castration anxiety by making the wife, Lina, Cheng contends that supposed horror of female castra- the Loosian unadorned surface tion bearable,” Cheng notes that it “hous[es] the very ‘primitive’ ghosts is unclear how “the terms of dis- that it denounces”(32). Cheng calls avowal, displacement, and replace- this simultaneity the modern- ment” would function for the racial ist “dream of a second skin” (1); fetish (45, 46). In a virtuosic track- the Loosian surface both protects ing of the multivalent possibilities modern man (as George Simmel of the banana skirt, she suggests suggests in “The Metropolis and some of the ways in which these Mental Life” [1903]) and imperson- two fetishes are disaligned: ates the rejected tattooing of the Papuan by theorizing “the build- If Baker is seen as offering ing itself . . . as a cover grafted unto up a classic spectacle of ra- the body.” That is, “the desire to cialized femininity for the house the body grows most vitally white heterosexual male out of the desire to be the body” gaze, then she is also serving (54). Cheng’s genealogy represents up femininity armed with a a major step forward in thinking ring of embarrassingly fruit- through the interrelationship of ful phalluses. . . . The effects embodiment, sexuality, and archi- of that fantasmatic “phallus” tecture—particularly the queer on the desiring European au- energies of architecture, which re- dience not only invoke the main relatively unexplored.4 homoerotic undertones of Chapter 4, “What Bananas heterosexual desire but also Say,” focuses on Baker’s most fa- cross over into the colonial mous covering—her iconic banana register: one would also have skirt—in order to consider the re- to confront the possibility lationship between buildings and that this now phallic mater- bodies. While Cheng attends to the nal body holds as well as an imperial inscriptions that constitute uncomfortable affinity to 518 BENJAMIN kahan

black masculinity, the “ape” of Modernism (1994) has teased out to which the bananas allude. the racist implications of such ra- And if one sees the skirt as cial impersonation under the sign a domestication of Baker’s of the hermeneutics of suspicion, jungle ways, then one must Cheng posits what she will call also confront the fact that in chapter 9 the “hermeneutics of civilized blackness flaunts susceptibility” (167).5 While this a set of (flaccid or taut?) ba- discussion is unfortunately trun- nanas. (46–47) cated in the book, an article ver- sion of this chapter understands Here, the racial and sexual fetishes the hermeneutics of susceptibility “are not merely parallel or addi- to worry over the hermeneutics of tive,” but interrupt, contest, and suspicion’s tendency to “produce a overwrite each other (46). Rather stable object/subject (reader/text) than being structured by disavowal, dyad that is not only illusory but the racial fetishist seeks “to have also has blinded us to what might and be that otherness” (47). be written on the surface.”6 In Cheng elaborates this logic of contradistinction, Cheng offers the racial fetish in chapter 5, “Hous- “a reading practice that is willing ing Baker, Dressing Loos.” In this to follow, rather than suppress, chapter, Cheng explores Loos’s de- the wayward life of the subject sign for a planned but never built and object in dynamic interface.”7 house for Baker that features an Thus, when Loos creates a house enormous two-story swimming pool that aims to be like Baker, he opens at its center (complete with peep- himself and the house to the con- holes). Juxtaposing the striped de- tamination and frisson of inter- sign of Loos’s proposed house with mingling subject and object. He an image of Baker taken in Paris dares to don a second skin. around the same time in which Reading across Baker’s photo- she wears a zebra pattern, Cheng graphic and filmic representation, wonders whether Loos’s house is chapters 7 and 8 map the early not so much an exploitation of her twentieth century as an era of par- as it is a simulation: “The dynam- ticular susceptibility to this nexus ics of the Baker House [particularly of subject and object. Cheng ar- around the swimming pool] begins gues that “materials like plastics, to look less like an inscription about Bakelite, [and] celluloid promised Baker than an inscription that aims a new compatibility between the to be like Baker (66).” Cheng here organic and the inorganic” that by effects a shift in the ways that we the mid-twentieth century signi- understand primitivist modernism. fied primarily “things cheap, in- Whereas Michael North’s Dialect sipid, and painfully artificial” (117). on second skin 519

This muddling of the animate thought. And “it” leads us and the inanimate enables Cheng not to the separation of es- to begin to reverse or heal Baker’s sence and appearance but to “presumed acquiescence to the ob- an animated relay between jectification of the racialized female epidermal certitude and sty- body” (119). Rather than locate this listic vicissitude in the mak- agency in Baker’s intentions, Cheng ing of racial legibility. (172) sees the representational surface of Baker’s skin and its interplay and This conclusion suggests that incorporation of objects around it Cheng’s book provides a model for and enshrouding it as a “frighten- thinking personhood at the border ing-yet-seductive affinity for ob- of thing theory. For this insight jectness” (121). This hinge between and many others, this book will subject and object is what endows be of interest to anyone working Baker’s exhibitionism with its “lay- in modernist studies, architectural ered conflation of concealment and theory, primitivism, critical race exposure, of essence and perfor- studies, gender and sexuality stud- mance, of flesh and skin.” Baker’s ies, and psychoanalysis. It is a book “nudity” outruns the “scopic re- that shines with all of the radiance gime” of the striptease by enacting of Baker herself and deserves to be “key moments of exposure in her read very widely. films and photographs” through an “elaborate engagement with both Benjamin Kahan is Assistant Professor of literal and symbolic veils” (58). English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held Cheng’s book closes by meditat- postdoctoral fellowships at Washington Uni- ing on what is at stake on eschew- versity in St. Louis, Emory University, and ing Baker’s interiority to read on the University of Pittsburgh. His book Celi- bacies: American Modernism and Sexual the surface; she contends that such Life will be published by Duke University a practice “critiques the assumption Press in fall 2013. of authenticity and embodiment utilized by both liberal criticism and colonial racism” (161). Expanding Notes this insight, Cheng argues, 1. Roland Barthes, “Striptease,” in My- thologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New She [Baker] is neither the York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), willfully subversive agent 84–87, quotation on 84. that critics hoped for nor the 2. Ibid., 84–85, emphasis in the original. broken subject that history 3. Ibid., 85. demanded. . . . The “body” 4. For an excellent exception, see Richard of Baker is both more and Quentin Donald Hornsby, The Spiv less than the thing that we and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar 520 BENJAMIN kahan

London (Minneapolis: University of Literature, Race and American Culture Minnesota Press, 2010). See also Aaron Series (Oxford: Oxford University Betsky, Building Sex: Men, Women, Press, 1994). Architecture, and the Construction of 6. Anne Anlin Cheng, “Skins, Tattoos, Sexuality (New York: William Morrow, and Susceptibility,” Representations 1995); and Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: 108, no. 1 (2009): 98–119, quotation on Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New 100. York: William Morrow, 1997). 7. Ibid., 100–101, emphasis in the 5. Michael North, Dialect of Modernism: original. Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century