Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in SocietyFor centuries, the categories of 'whore' and 'actress' have overlapped. Actresses are assumed to be sexually available and promiscuous, and prostitutes are assumed to perform for their clients. Using biographies of historical actresses and p rostitutes and interviews with contemporary sex workers, this book explores the various connections between actresses and prostitutes from Nell Gwynne to Mae West. In this highly original study, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, Kirsten Pullen offers many new insights to theatre historians and scholars of cultural, social and gender studies. |
Contents
Prostitution performance and Mae West speaking from the whore position | 1 |
Betty Boutell Whom all the Town Fucks constructing the actresswhore | 22 |
Memoir and masquerade Charlotte Charke Margaret Leeson and eighteenthcentury performances of self | 55 |
Burlesque breeches and Blondes illegitimate nineteenthcentury cultural and theatrical performance | 93 |
We Need Status as Actresses contemporary prostitution and performance | 134 |
Afterpiece millennial prostitution | 167 |
Notes | 175 |
| 195 | |
| 213 | |
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Common terms and phrases
acting actors actress/whore argues audience members autobiography behavior Betty Boutell biographies body Boutell Boutell's breeches role British Blondes burlesque burlesque performers call girls career century characters Charke's Charlotte Charke Charlotte Cushman Chicago Cibber clients Colley Cibber construction contemporary prostitutes conventional critics cross-dressed cultural demonstrates discourse dominant dress eighteenth Elizabeth English actresses entertainment example fashion female burlesque female sexuality femininity feminism feminist film Further gender Henderson historians History identity ideology included interviews lesbian lives Lydia Thompson Mae West male Margaret Leeson Margy marriage married masculine masquerade mass media Memoirs middle-class Milhous moral nineteenth-century norms offered plays pleasure popular Pretty Woman pro-sex feminist prostitution relationship representations of prostitution Restoration actresses Restoration Comedy rights movement Routledge seems sex industry sex workers Sexual Suspects social stage story suggests Theatres and Things Things Theatrical traditional transgressive trope troupe University Press US-American Victorian West's whore position whore stigma writing