The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque
The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.
Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section. These essays chart the fascinating ways in which the Gurlesque bleeds, in a gaudy gush, into discussions about pop culture, identity, and sexuality; into other art forms (music, film, needlework); and over borders of time and space — to contemporary Sweden, Ireland, and Korea, and to 1920s Greenwich Village and 1960s Czechoslovakia. Some of these essays even “do the Gurlesque,” taking up a prose style that self-consciously performs excess, girliness, or grotesquerie.
In putting together this collection of essays about or related to Gurlesque poets and aesthetics, we drew from previously published pieces and from those written specifically in response to our call for papers. In what follows, I highlight some of the shared concerns of the essays and flesh out some critical contexts. My account of the Gurlesque here is both a product of reading and editing these essays, and a reflection of my own understanding of the aesthetic, which has grown and shifted over the last decade: I first learned about the Gurlesque in 2004 by coming across Arielle’s original talk published at Small Press Traffic, then followed the blog conversations of the mid- to late-aughts (on Johannes Göransson’s Exoskeleton and Amy King’s blog, for example), and then watched as the aesthetic spread and transformed, as poets from the first anthology began to teach, publish, or otherwise influence younger writers, many of whom are represented in Electric Gurlesque.
&vs.: Nonbinary Frameworks and Gurlesque Dialectics
While I was studying for my PhD qualifying exams, I invented a punctuation mark. The “andverse” is the fusion of the ampersand and the abbreviation for “versus”: &vs. It was a shorthand way for me to pull together terms and concepts that were in generative tension with one another: the everyday &vs. the extraordinary, feminist theory &vs. gender studies, and so on. The andverse allowed me to develop a research methodology that could resist and reframe the binary thinking that I was encountering in my reading and could allow me to make connections across the somewhat arbitrary groupings of an exam reading list.
As a friend who now uses the andverse in the unit titles for his courses (e.g., “Awakening &vs. Enlightenment in the 18th Century”) pointed out to me, the andverse encourages dialectical thinking. It was a similar sense of dialectics — the juxtaposition of opposing concepts, and the productive friction that results — that struck me as I reread the essays we chose to include in Electric Gurlesque. Dialectical thought — that push and pull of opposites that strives toward, but does not always achieve, some level of synthesis — frames the central characteristics of the Gurlesque, sheds light on some of the confusion surrounding the aesthetic, and provides ways of thinking through some of its limits.
From the start, Arielle Greenberg, in her 2002 lecture “On the Gurlesque,” defines the Gurlesque as an aesthetic that combines the “serious” and the “frilly.” Gurlesque poetry “prankishly celebrates the same cultural trappings it seeks to critique: it has fun with the idea of the feminine, makes fun of it, jokes and laughs about it” as a way to try to dismantle it. In her essay included here, B. K. Fischer remarks that the Gurlesque dialectically “has one hand in the grotesque (an expectorated insult, a sex act as slur), the other in the azure (the aesthetically lush).” Maria Margareta Österholm offers the image of “the female grotesque at a princess party.”
The double-edged, Janus-faced, both/and quality of the Gurlesque reflects women’s appropriately ambivalent reaction to the cultural devaluation of the feminine more broadly and to the girly in particular. The poets’ excessive, campy performance of femininity addresses itself to a society that doesn’t take girliness seriously, announcing a self-awareness about feminine frivolity at the same time as it prances around in ripped petticoats. It’s a seductive, sarcastic comeback: You wanna see dumb, cloying, embarrassing, juvenile? In this way, the excess of the Gurlesque becomes not only a way to highlight the artificiality of femininity, thereby denaturalizing it, but also a way of insisting on feminine pleasure and agency, as Ailbhe Darcy argues: “It is through excess — the joyful ‘camping up’ of a culture — that the Gurlesque poets reveal the artificiality and absurdity of that which they burlesque without, importantly, denying their own reliance on it and pleasure in it.”
Girly &vs. Grotesque Excess
Femininity, when exaggerated, finds its dialectical twin in the abject and monstrous, as Lara Glenum argues via Sianne Ngai’s theories of cuteness in her introduction to the first edition of Gurlesque, and as many of these essays emphasize. The Gurlesque, as Sarah Cook observes about Kate Durbin’s work, is invested in “taking the most privileged shapes of femaleness and performing them to the point of explosion, until prescribed femininity has been revealed in its fullest, grossest form.” Durbin’s teenage girl is possessed and grotesque, a demon susceptible to “levitation, vomiting gold coins, and inappropriate noises — speaking in tongues, barks, grunts, and mocking imitations of a male voice.” Amanda Montei argues that Durbin’s girliness-in-excess belongs to a new archive of the grotesque centered on women’s bodies: “Instead of locating the grotesque in a readily apparent history of the grotesque, Durbin locates it in female bodies’ desire to perform, and the often abject failure of those bodies to achieve the unattainable ideal of (white) heteronormative femininity.” The impossibility of realizing idealized femininity produces (problematic) disgust both for the performer and for the spectator, and Gurlesque writing and art exploits this inevitable falling-short.
For women of color, the possibility of embodying normative ideals of femininity is even more fraught. In a statement on her own hybrid poetics, Kim Gek Lin Short explores how the experience of motherhood impacted her ability to develop her character’s relationship to traditional American femininity as embodied in the country western star: “My new maternal identity helped me flesh out the pathos of this poor abused spirited Chinese girl who idealizes Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline.” Many women of color must also negotiate, in addition to white heteronormative American femininity, the feminine ideals enforced in their countries of origin or within their ethnic communities in the U.S. Sawako Nakayasu describes how her poetry resists Japanese feminine norms in ways that are perhaps related, like Durbin’s, to the resistant attitudes of adolescent girlhood: “I don’t want it to seem like some kind of ongoing teenage rebellion, but it seems I’ve taken to mining the discord between the propriety of the young Japanese woman (that I was supposed to become) — and the sort of clear, controlled, removed tone of writing that comes with it, and the vomiting and fucking and whatever other improprieties that may go on, to whatever extent, in my life and work.” Channeling one’s inner teenage rebel is, in Gurlesque poetry, a strategy for juggling such contradictions and for connecting with others who are doing the same, as in the “the red-light district of sexual and scatological sincerity” of Jenny Zhang’s poetry as described by Jeff Nguyen, who explores how her girly deployment of vulgar language allows for the possibility of intimacy and alliance among the marginalized.
Metta Sáma locates a similar interrogation of the “performance of proper behavior” in Khadijah Queen’s play Non-Sequitur, whose character names — The White Appropriation, The Blonde Institution — serve as stock characters enacting and mocking stereotypes of race and gender. Geraldine Kim argues that Gurlesque writers’ use of theatrical forms makes the grotesque more immediate and visceral, as in the work of Stacy Doris, Lara Glenum, and Dorothea Lasky.
If all women’s bodies are rendered “other” and therefore monstrous under patriarchy, this reality is intensified for women of color. Carmen Giménez Smith, in her review of Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific, demonstrates how Black women have a necessarily different relationship to the idea of monstrous femininity, which has long been attributed to black female bodies by those in power, as emblematized by Thomas Jefferson’s “vile depictions of black bodily excess” that Petrosino reappropriates. At the same time, women writing from more deeply marginalized positions can even more powerfully expose the norms of normative femininity, including its implicit whiteness. As Trina Young notes: “If [the Gurlesque] developed from fighting against the patriarchy’s similarly limited definition of femininity, then of course some of us weren’t included. Mainstream patriarchy ignores brown and Black women, except for when they’re fetishizing us.”
Electric Gurlesque demonstrates that women of color who employ Gurlesque strategies often critique traditional femininity in the most radical, subversive, politically urgent ways, while at the same time highlighting the fact that people of color, immigrants, the working class, and other marginalized peoples are not always granted access to the privilege of an ironic performance of selfhood, gendered or otherwise. Nguyen quotes Zhang: “We can’t feel disgust AND delight. We can’t take something seriously and joke about it without one reaction canceling out or beating the snot out of the other. And that shit is alienating.” In this view, irony and ambivalence are luxuries reserved for those who most closely embody social norms — i.e., straight, white cis women. The fact that other women may not be able to access, or choose to avoid, Gurlesque modes — and the fact that their writing registers these feelings of exclusion or refusal — exposes the hegemonic cultural forces that deny them a fuller range of responses.
Weaponized Femininity &vs. Violence
From the start, Greenberg theorized the way in which the Gurlesque enacts the “horror so closely associated with women’s suppression.” Gurlesque poetry reveals how feminine presentation—looking, acting, and sounding girly—sits in dialectical tension with violence. This includes both the cultural and aesthetic violence of devaluing the feminine, and the physical and emotional violence that preys on femininity as weakness. Because the U.S. was founded upon what bell hooks calls “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” and because rape culture remains pervasive even after decades of social transformation and legal reform, in the binary Western social order, femininity occupies the position of the subjugated and submissive.
Girls born into American culture learn to perform and negotiate their femininity under duress almost immediately. Some experience punitive consequences for not being feminine enough; others face the threat of harm for being perceived as vulnerable, passive, or defenseless. These and other hazards constitute the very process by which girls become girls, as Caolan Madden argues: “violence towards women […] brings girlhood into being.” Ruth Williams understands the violent response embedded in the Gurlesque as the inevitable consequence of “the female body as it is rendered under the male gaze.” Quoting an article on girl bands, Williams demonstrates how combining “symbols of conventional female ‘prettiness’ with violent and destructive images” to reveal “the violence to and alienation from the body that obedient performances of ‘pretty’ femininity entail” is a common characteristic of both Gurlesque poetry and riot grrl music, both of which “willfully adopt the monikers of debased femininity — the slut, the cunt, the bitch.”
Gurlesque poetry confronts readers-as-spectators with their own involvement in the simultaneous fetishization and devaluation of the feminine, as Will Vincent argues regarding the abject in Glenum’s poetry: “By exaggerating her characters’ propensity for overt, kinky sexuality and broadcasting it, she forces us to deal with the myriad ways we may actually be complicit with real world objectification in pop culture’s many spectacles.” This focus on artifice “un-alienates a culture of sexual violence,” offering not an escape, but a new reentry point: a jolt out of numb complacency straight into the heart of rape culture. In Kim Gek Lin Short’s Run, the aestheticization of violence — sharp, gorgeous prose that depicts horrifying scenes of sexual abuse — works on a similar level, forcing us to confront the cultures that condone these acts, as I argue in my review. Mira Gonzalez’s poetry, in which sex “is described flatly and without detail,” as Jay Gabler puts it, exaggerates emptiness rather than artifice, but once again, Gonzalez’s stylistic excess (toning it way down instead of way up) asks the reader to question his or her voyeuristic consumption.
As an aesthetic manifestation of the way femininity is bound up in violence, the Gurlesque is related to the internet trend known as “weaponized femininity” that emerged in memes on Tumblr and other websites in the early 2010s. Jillian Horowitz describes weaponized femininity as an aesthetic of “overt femininity, bordering on the exaggerated” that “turns objects coded as feminine into threats” as a way of “weaponiz[ing] feminist anger and the devalued trappings of femininity.” Gurlesque poetry, too, comes at the reader with its lipstick-laden teeth bared.
Girl Power &vs. Feminine Failure
Some of the skepticism leveled at the Gurlesque — the things I’ve heard at poetry readings and seen on comment threads — often emerges, I suspect, from a degree of confusion about its dialectical qualities. The biggest misconception about the Gurlesque is that it uncritically embraces the girly and the feminine; in fact, Gurlesque writing always mocks and exaggerates, and thereby distances itself from, these concepts. I would argue that this misreading is related to a larger trend — at this point nearly a cliché — related to the critique of third-wave feminism by second-wave feminists. Many feminists who fought, from the 1960s onward, for women to be treated as equal to adult men object to “the application of ‘girl’ to adult women because of its implications of infantilization and belittlement” and are suspicious of the way “girl culture foregrounds the relationship between feminism and popular culture,” as Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford argue. See, for example, the way Susan Faludi, in a 2010 article in Harper’s, scoffs at the “hokum of ‘girl power’” and the “infantile transgressiveness” of today’s feminism, “where ‘liberation’ begins and ends with wordplay and pop-culture pastiche and fishnet stockings.”
If these descriptions sound a lot like the Gurlesque, Faludi’s misstep is to equate this investment in pop culture and dress-up with a search for “liberation” and “power.” The dismissal of third-wave — or fourth- or x-wave — feminisms on the grounds that they are naïve and girly is, in fact, a reenactment of the very power dynamics that these modes of feminism, including Gurlesque poetry, seek to expose and critique. Informed by gender and queer theory, younger feminists self-consciously perform feminine and femme identities with pleasure even as they simultaneously interrogate the ways in which femininity is inevitably set up to fail under imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In monstrous Gurlesque poetry, the possessed speaker has “questionable political efficacy” and is instead “hungry, leering, ‘gakking,’” as Art Middleton writes of Danielle Pafunda. Gurlesque poetry sometimes enacts, as Greenberg observes in our conversation included here, “a political act of self-destruction or erasure, or an admission of total defeat and annihilation that is its own kind of triumph,” whereas what we call “Faux Gurlesque” poetry “is more mournful about the failures of femininity.”
While the Gurlesque and other contemporary feminist approaches embrace the girly and the pop, it is important to note that they do so ambivalently, as Shelley Budgeon argues: “For third-wave feminism it is possible to approach popular culture simultaneously as a site of pleasure and an object of critique. By refusing to deploy straightforward codes to designate contemporary gender ideals in terms of simple binaries such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, third-wave feminism insists on the necessity of straddling binaries and working with the contradictions that result.” As Monica McClure puts it, embracing both failure and contradiction: “I’m allowed to fuck up, to be titillating, to be untasteful, to be flippant and still be taken seriously.”
The dialectics of the Gurlesque can be understood as part of a larger contemporary feminist effort to negotiate the problematic status of femininity and girliness in a culture that has been both deeply altered by feminism and fully saturated by consumerism. Gurlesque poets interrogate whether it is possible to valorize the feminine while simultaneously resisting the structures that maintain women’s powerlessness. Irony, ambivalence, reappropriation, and pastiche are feminist strategies that can hold such contradictions without flattening them; they are also strategies especially suitable to poetry, where they produce startling and often hysterical (as in uncontrollable, as in hilarious) juxtapositions.
Normative &vs. Underrepresented Girlhoods
Some of the most incisive critiques of the Gurlesque thus far have shown how any reclamation of the girly runs the risk of reifying girlhood as white, cis-heteronormative, middle- to upper-class, and American. As Megan Milks points out in the introduction to their conversation with Ezra Stone, the Gurlesque has been gaining currency as an aesthetic at a moment when girls have become more prominent subjects in TV shows and movies, which are often called out for their representations of affluence, whiteness, and other types of privilege. Milks and Stone extend this conversation into the literary world, asking which types of girls get to be culturally visible in fiction and poetry, and shedding light on “productions of the Girl that are genderqueer or trans […]; modes of the grotesque that are not cute; modes of gender performance not grounded in artifice or excess.”
While there are many kinds of girls discussed in these essays and figured in these poems — teenage girl, woman-girl, mother-girl, child-girl, dead girl, queer girl, straight girl, trans girl, Black girl, Latinx girl, Asian girl, white girl — the Gurlesque is, by definition, a feminine aesthetic, and therefore does exclude the non-feminine girls, real and literary, who deserve their own poems and essays and theories. At the same time, all girls should be able to claim and redefine the category of girl if they choose, and there are opportunities for what Audre Lorde called “coalition politics” across girl identities. As Stone suggests, one possible point of connection arises out of shared experiences of girlhood under patriarchy, in the form of “body horror, anxiety, private joy, and shame; saturation, sexual ambivalence.” Many types of girls share a “violent relationship to the identity/experience of being a girl,” as Milks writes — and, of course, feminist solidarity has long emerged out of these grim bonds.
Several of these essays begin to sketch some of the possible relationships between queer girlhood and the Gurlesque. The queer, trans, or gender-nonconforming girl’s disidentification with/from the girly can, paradoxically, breed identification and desire. As Milks says of the Sweet Valley twins: “I strongly identified with Elizabeth but secretly wanted to be/fuck Jessica.” Ames Hawkins wonders, addressing the concept of the Gurlesque and a real girl at the same time, “Maybe you(’re) like me? More than a little?” Quoting Joy Ladin, Hawkins names this “both/and, neithering” approach of dis/identification as central to trans poetics: “Trans poetics show us who we are by showing us who we aren’t.” These visions of solidarity and difference importantly expose the Gurlesque’s cis-hetero privilege even as they underscore the Gurlesque’s potential to destabilize gendered and sexual norms. This is the andverse of the Gurlesque: out of these lived paradoxes, new identities and desires are explored, and new art is made.
Here/Now &vs. Then/There
The question of whether the Gurlesque can be located outside of certain enactments of femininity in late 20th- and early 21st-century American poetry remains mostly uncharted critical territory, although several essays here point to remarkable examples of the proto-Gurlesque, international Gurlesque, and the Gurlesque in other art forms. Österholm and Österlund persuasively demonstrate that feminine performativity can be found in Swedish prose writing; at the same time, the Gurlesque writer “looks different when she travels across national borders, climbs between the lines and wrestles with different power hierarchies.”
In the UK, many poets were introduced to Gurlesque poetry through classes and events organized by Roddy Lumsden, as Amy Key recounts. She describes the giddy fanaticism for the work of Chelsey Minnis experienced by younger British poets in the early 2000s: “In a pub after class one night, we even made a handbag of her book BAD BAD, by threading a long pink ribbon through the middle of it and wearing it cross-wise over the body.” This “fangirl” attitude might explain why Gurlesque aesthetics have spread so widely and quickly in the U.S.: this poetry is funny and shocking and revolutionary. Emily Brandt testifies to the way, as a music and poetry lover, a riot grrl youth translated into a Gurlesque adulthood: “These days, instead of punk shows at dimly lit clubs and community centers, I go to poetry readings in bars and bookstores.” Greenberg, the original Gurlesque fangirl, locates the aesthetic not only in poetry and art, but also in the songs, music videos, and stage garb of many contemporary women musicians, such as Poly Styrene, Björk, Courtney Love, and (maybe) Lady Gaga.
The Gurlesque can be located in still more art forms. Caolan Madden reads Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (released in 1966, the same year Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the U.S.) as an example of an international proto-Gurlesque, examining “this wastedness, this dollishness, this ennui, this collage, this dirtiness, this excess, this friendiness, this girliness.” Maria Damon finds the Gurlesque in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “combination of stitchery, often associated with feminine gentility […] with the exercise of linguistic vulgarity associated with men of the artistic avant-garde”: in 1920s Greenwich Village, she discovers the feminine &vs. the vulgar once more.
Fissures &vs. Futures of the Gurlesque
In her examination of contemporary Irish poet Dorothy Molloy’s work, Ailbhe Darcy argues that the American “shorthand of Hello Kitty, glitter, and anorexia can be exchanged for alternative sets of cultural referents.” Now that the range of writers who take up Gurlesque strategies has become more diverse, we might apply Darcy’s critical move to the new work presented in Electric Gurlesque. How are girly cultural referents being taken up differently in the U.S. by African American, Asian American, and Latinx writers? By queer and trans writers? By poets who are not affluent or able-bodied? What kinds of feminine affects and embodiments are being performed and critiqued in this work, and which norms are being torn down?
With the publication of Electric Gurlesque, these questions and more are now up for discussion. This selection of essays gives a sense of the exciting critical work being undertaken to illuminate the riotous, subversive state of femininity in the early 21st century. At the same time, the act of anthologizing always reveals gaps, fissures, and limits, and there are many aspects of and questions about the Gurlesque that have yet to be addressed. One such limit is presented as a possibility by Dutch poet and critic Nadia de Vries: “I look forward to seeing the Gurlesque become a poetics in which female suffering transcends the potential for burlesque transformation, and becomes a true mouthpiece for all forms of feminine resistance.”
We hope that these essays complicate and deepen conversations about feminist poetics, and that they might serve as the foundation for future critical, theoretical, and creative work about girlhood, feminism, gender, race, class, sexuality, and other modes of identity and ways of being in the new millennium.
Notes
Budgeon, Shelley. “The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New’ Femininities.” New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 279-92. Print.
Faludi, Susan. “American Electra: Feminism’s ritual matricide.” Harper’s Magazine 321 (2010): 29-42. Web.
Gillis, Stacy, and Rebecca Munford. “Genealogies and generations: the politics and praxis of third wave feminism.” Women’s History Review 13.2 (2004): 165-182. Web.
Greenberg, Arielle. “On the Gurlesque.” Small Press Traffic. April 2003. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.
Horowitz, Jillian. “Collecting Male Tears: Misandry and Weaponized Femininity on the Internet.” Digital America. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.
All other works appear in Electric Gurlesque.
