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WORK TITLE: The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.vwu.edu/academics/majors/history/faculty-and-staff.php?person_id=0585475 * https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleen-casey-19857835/ * http://www.vwu.edu/news-a-events/news-releases/welcome-new-faculty-academic-staff
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2014066494
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2014066494
HEADING: Casey, Kathleen B.
000 00644cz a2200193n 450
001 9692039
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008 141024n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2014066494
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca09998526
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d NN
100 1_ |a Casey, Kathleen B.
370 __ |c United States |2 naf
372 __ |a History |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Virginia Wesleyan College |2 naf
374 __ |a College teachers |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a The prettiest girl on stage is a man, 2015: |b t.p. (Kathleen B. Casey) dust jacket back cover lap (assistant professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College)
PERSONAL
Born 1981.
EDUCATION:University of Rochester, B.A., Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Rochester, NY, postdoctoral fellow, 2010-11; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor, 2011-12; Virginia Wesleyan College, Norfolk, assistant professor, 2012—.
AWARDS:Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities; VFIC Mednick Memorial Fellowship, 2016.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kathleen B. Casey is a writer and educator. She holds both a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Casey remained at that school after earning her Ph.D. and worked there as a postdoctoral fellow. During the 2011-12 academic year, she served as the Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Casey went on to join Virginia Wesleyan College as an assistant professor in 2012. The focus of her research is on gender and women’s issues in American history.
In 2015, Casey released her first book, The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville. The volume includes profiles of four gender-bending vaudeville performers. Two of the performers Casey discusses, Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge, were romantically involved for a time. Eltinge was known for performing on stage as a female. When the two had an unofficial wedding, Eltinge dressed as a woman, while Tanguay wore men’s clothing. Tanguay flaunted her sexuality in the songs she performed on stage and had a carefree attitude that made her famous. Eltinge cross-dressed on stage from the time he was a child. By the time he became a teenager, he had performed as a girl in Boston and on Broadway in New York. He was cast to appear in ads for women’s skin creams. Eltinge eventually became a Hollywood star, though his career suffered after vaudeville’s popularity abruptly declined during the Great Depression. Lillyn Brown was an African American woman who impersonated men on stage. In a popular act of hers, Brown performed as a man in a hat and tuxedo, revealing that she was a female at the end of the act. The fourth person Casey profiles in the book is Sophie Tucker, a singer. Tucker began her career performing as a “coon shouter,” painting herself in blackface, though she was not African American. She ultimately began performing as herself and had a lengthy career.
Lauren Rebecca Skearofe offered a mixed review of The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man in the Journal of Southern History. Skearofe suggested that attempting to include the biographies of four people in the book made the characterization of those four people lacking. However, Skearofe concluded: “Casey’s study is still extremely important in building the vaudeville literature and proving that audiences relished the acts of those who moved across tradition. There is a treasure trove of untapped archival material in this area, and Casey’s work signals a positive step in learning more about one of the most popular forms of entertainment.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, May, 2017, Lauren Rebecca Skearofe, review of The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, p. 449.
ONLINE
Kathleen B. Casey Website, https://kathleenbcasey.com/ (November 9, 2017).
University of California Press Website, http://phr.ucpress.edu/ (May 1, 2017), LeRoy Ashby, review of The Prettiest Girl in the Room is a Man.
Virginia Wesleyan University Website, https://www.vwu.edu/ (November 9, 2017), author faculty profile.*
Kathleen B. Casey, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan College
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Kathleen B. Casey is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia. She received her doctorate in History and certification in Gender and Women’s Studies in 2010 from the University of Rochester, where she received the Susan B. Anthony Award for Most Distinguished Dissertation in Women’s Studies. After serving as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester from 2010 to 2011, she was a Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Honors College from 2011 to 2012.
Professor Casey’s area of expertise is late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cultural and social history. Her research and teaching interests include modern American popular and material culture, gender and sexuality, and African-American history. Her first book, The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) explores performances of gender and race from 1900 to 1930. Her current project, The Things She Carried: Women and the Power of the Purse, is a cultural and social biography of the purse, which explores how and why purses became intimately linked with evolving understandings of gender, travel, waged work, and modernity.
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Kathleen Casey
Kathleen Casey
Assistant Professor of History
Education
B.A., Ph.D., University of Rochester
Office Location: Batten 246-A
Phone: 757-455-2116
Email: kcasey@vwu.edu
Department/s: History
Personal Website
About
Kathleen Casey received her doctorate in History in 2010 from the University of Rochester, where she was the recipient of the Susan B. Anthony Award for Most Distinguished Dissertation in Women’s Studies. Before joining the faculty of the History Department and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Wesleyan College in 2012, she was the Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Honors College. Dr. Casey currently teaches a variety of courses, including African American History Since the Civil War, Apparel in American History, The Pursuit of Pleasure: A History of Recreation in America, U.S. Women’s History, Big Brother in the Bedroom, and Introduction to Women and Gender Studies.
Her areas of expertise include late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cultural and social history. Her research interests include modern American popular and material culture, gender and sexuality, and African-American history. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 2016 VFIC Mednick Memorial Fellowship. She is currently working on her second book project, a social and cultural biography of the purse in America from the 19th century to the present.
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QUOTED: "Casey's study is still extremely important in building the vaudeville literature and proving that audiences relished the acts of those who moved across tradition. There is a treasure trove of untapped archival material in this area, and Casey's work signals a positive step in learning more about one of the most popular forms of entertainment."
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508730332771 1/2
Print Marked Items
The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and
Gender Benders in American Vaudeville
Lauren Rebecca Skearofe
Journal of Southern History.
83.2 (May 2017): p449.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville. By Kathleen B. Casey.
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015. Pp. xxx, 210. $64.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-165-5.)
Kathleen B. Casey's recent contribution to the growing literature on vaudeville is an ambitious study of four nowforgotten,
yet extremely significant, individuals. With its focus on the racial and gender boundaries crossed by some of
the biggest attractions of the first decades of the twentieth century--performer Eva Tanguay, female impersonator Julian
Eltinge, African American male impersonator Lillyn Brown, and singer Sophie Tucker--The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a
Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville demonstrates how vaudeville was central to the making of
alternative ideologies. It is difficult to emphasize how little scholarly attention these stars have received. Although
Tucker and Tanguay have begun to gain some traction among academics in recent years, none of these have the
recognition of contemporaries such as Irving Berlin and Al Jolson or black blues queens such as Bessie Smith and
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. As a result, Casey has a substantial amount of terrain to cover, and she does so admirably.
Highlights of the book are Casey's nuanced arguments about gender inversion, particularly in reference to Eltinge and
Brown. Eltinge's role in advertising skin creams for women is fascinating. As the only married performer in the study,
Brown offers an important counterexample of how those who crossed boundaries on stage were not always
unconventional in their personal lives. The coverage of Brown in both the black and the white press reveals the mixed
response to male impersonators, and their uneven reception, regardless of the color line. As much as Casey engages
with the literature on feminism and performance, she focuses less on ideas about ventriloquism and deception,
captured so brilliantly in James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum
(Cambridge, Mass,, 2001). Most vaudevillians, from Pauline the Hypnotist to the boxing Gordon sisters, were
spectacles of artifice, and it would benefit Casey to consider whether her study might extend the findings Cook
attributed to Jacksonian America.
A huge challenge of presenting four abbreviated biographies is the difficulty of capturing the complexities of a lifetime
that may perhaps not fit the author's central paradigm. The study of Tucker centers on her early years as a "coon
shouting" performer and remains rather fixed on that concept, even when Tucker spoke against the term and was
rebranded by the 191 Os (p. 115). Undoubtedly, the "coon shouter" label was tough for Tucker to shed; some listeners
believed Tucker was African American. Nevertheless, her career transcended and refuted intentional racial mimicry as
she became a spokeswoman for black causes, particularly the Negro Actors Guild. Ralph Bunche spoke at her golden
jubilee anniversary for her promotion of racial equality. In addition, Casey's claim that Tucker was "rarely described as
maternal" is far off; she was renowned for mentoring young stars, most famously Judy Garland (p. 120). The two
women worked together in two films, Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) and Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937).
Although Tucker devoted less of herself to her own son, her motherly persona is what propelled her success among
audiences and industry leaders.
All of this aside, Casey's study is still extremely important in building the vaudeville literature and proving that
audiences relished the acts of those who moved across tradition. There is a treasure trove of untapped archival material
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508730332771 2/2
in this area, and Casey's work signals a positive step in learning more about one of the most popular forms of
entertainment in the United States.
Lauren Rebecca Skearofe
University of South Carolina
Skearofe, Lauren Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Skearofe, Lauren Rebecca. "The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville."
Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 2, 2017, p. 449+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495476249&it=r&asid=de0a6313a73a39a24808e49f7e19b532.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495476249
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Pacific Historical Review
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Review: The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville. by Kathleen B. Casey
LeRoy Ashby
Pacific Historical Review
Vol. 86 No. 2, May 2017
(pp. 373-375) DOI: 10.1525/phr.2017.86.2.373
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Vol. 86 No. 2, May 2017
Pacific Historical Review: 86 (2)
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