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Staged: The Peculiar Confluence of Burlesque and Soviet Gulags

Sun, June 3, 10:00 to 11:30am, History Corner (450 Serra Mall, Building 200), 015

Abstract

In 1948, my Great-Aunt was seized in her Lithuanian village by the KGB, and along with her ten-year-old son, shipped to a Siberian Gulag. The charges: She had purportedly aided her brother, a partisan. In Igarka, the boy sickened and died within a year.

Also in 1948, my stepfather, an Italian-American WWII veteran, opened a Burlesque nightclub with money made bartering along the Italian front, making use of the fluent Italian learned from immigrant parents.

Until 2015, when I travelled to Lithuania to meet family, I assumed that Soviet Gulags and American Burlesque had nothing in common. But I recognized in photographs of my family taken at in the prison camp, an eerie resemblance to the advertising stills for the Burlesque club. Both were propaganda photos, depictions of happy workers, women pleased to take up shovels in Siberia, and G-Strings and pasties in the U.S.

My talk explores how--while there is no comparison between the suffering and experiences of the women of the Soviet Gulag and U.S exotic dancers--these drastically different WWII experiences were represented and “sold” in chillingly similar stilted photographs.

Short Bio

Jocelyn Bartkevicius is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. Her writing about Lithuania has received the Missouri Review Essay Award and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, and appeared in such journals as The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Bridges, and elsewhere including Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women. She is working on a memoir about the Lithuanian occupation and American Burlesque.

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