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To the minds of some, burlesque is all about sequin-and-lace outfits, red lipstick, and seductions in dark bars. Yet the reality is so much more complex, as longtime performer Fancy Feast’s new essay collection, Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques, vividly and capably illustrates. (In case you didn’t already know, the burlesque performers you see on stage likely got there on the subway, while toting a costume case and any number of other props in all kinds of weather, so make sure to tip well!)
As an outspoken fat performer, Fancy Feast is used to taking ownership of how audiences see her body, and the same recontextualization of self, identity, sexuality, and beauty is at work throughout Naked. Vogue recently spoke to Fancy Feast about bringing burlesque firmly into the literary fold, taking hope and inspiration from the resilience of the sex industry, and finding ways to care for herself while writing from the heart.
Vogue: How are you feeling, with the book about to come into the world?
Fancy Feast: Oh, my gosh, I am so excited for the book to come out—and I’m also shitting-myself terrified because real burlesque is a subculture, and so when subculture is exposed to mainstream, dominant culture or when it’s translated across genres, it just feels like there’s this tremendous responsibility to represent my corner of the world well. That’s been sort of sitting on my chest.
Are there any misconceptions about burlesque you’re hoping to correct or things about burlesque you really hope people take away from the book?
I think there’s this idea that burlesque is not culturally relevant, or there’s a sense that it belongs to either the sort of classic burlesque era of the ’30s through ’50s or the burlesque revival of the late ’90s and early 2000s that was sort of connected to the riot-grrrl movement. There’s the sense that it’s gone back underground in a way, but to me it seems like it’s deeply culturally relevant as an art form. Not just because it’s live and responds to and morphs around its audiences but also because the visibility of bodies—particularly sexualized bodies and, in my case, fat bodies—is something that is being scrubbed from the internet. Reality is being denied as we’ve entered this era of sex panic and antiquated politics around the freedom of bodies, so having that in the conversation is really important.
Is there anything that gives you hope, amid this moment of sex panic?
One of the things that I do to stave off existential dread in general is to think about the the adaptability and the resilience of people who work in the sex industry. Things have been bad before, and things have been different flavors of bad, but what I’ve found is that people in the sex industry, sex workers, and people who work in the underground are used to having their main channels of expression or of livelihood taken away from them. This is just the most current iteration, but there will always be a pivot. So that gives me hope; like, the systems don’t give me hope, but the people who are building community and working on skill sharing and learning about cybersecurity or whatever—all of that kind of stuff gives me hope.
What does it feel like to be addressing sex work and the sex industry in a literary format?
When I was on submission, there were questions from a number of different publishers about the cultural value of the book. There were situations where, say, an editor was really interested but the person who is heading up the press or something like that didn’t find the book highbrow enough to be published under their name. So there is a sense of having to negotiate respectability in the literary world that feels very different from performance. I didn’t realize that there can be a lot of prudishness in publishing, so I was on submission for a year and a half, which was a very, very long and painful time. But I knew there was a home for it, and I found an amazing editor and a great press. Still, there was a sense of: How much do I need to argue for the importance of the book versus how much can it exist on its own merits?
How did you prime yourself to write about some of the more difficult experiences in the book?
It was really important for me to ensure that anything published in the book was something that I’d already processed in other ways, like with my therapist or in private journals. If I could write it all down as a story, it’s because I had sufficient distance [to process] and integrate the parts that were meaningful to me, enough to tell somebody else about it. Events in my life that haven’t been digested through my sort of four ruminant stomachs are not in the book, so I didn’t actually have a difficult time writing about things that were very unpleasant or difficult that had happened in my life. Other things I had written that felt too close to my chest or that I was too protective about, my editor was like, “Are you ready to talk about this?” In terms of self-care, I was writing a lot during 2021, so still pretty locked-down pandemic times. My self-care game was trash, but writing gave me something to do and look forward to and work on, and it ended up actually sort of being a recursive self-care strategy. It really offered me a lot.
