Dance and Identity Politics in American Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters

The work of the Whitman sisters, in terms of racial discourse and rigid black/white and male/female binaries, was truly provocative.  These four light-skinned African American sisters transitioned in shocking and subversive ways through various identities, forcing audiences to consider the parameters of those identities and question their construction.  I found it interesting that because the Whitmans were so light-skinned, they would need to put blackface on to be read as black on stage.  This seems like a strange reiteration of an identity they already hold, however I suppose for practical reasons of performance it makes sense to some extent.  I also found it very intriguing that the sisters had performed as a white group, and then later transitioned to a black performance troupe.  I think this illuminates not only the inaccessibility of the dance world to many dancers of darker skin, but also the ability of the Whitmans to fool their audiences as to their identity.  Changing from blackface to no makeup to dyed blonde hair directly calls into question what an audience expects of a performance -- when they believe they are viewing four white women dancing, and then realize it is actually four black women with dyed hair, not only do they question how they came to assume the women were white, they then have already equated the skills of these black dancers with those of white dancers, without realizing they have done so.

At the biographical level, I also found it interesting that the Whitmans were personally so conservative, in terms of their Christian moral values, while their ideas of gender and race were portrayed so fluidly through their dance.  When the author writes that the Whitmans mandated that only the married couples could share a room, there was to be no "mortal sin" taking place under their watch, it seems as though the Whitmans' boundaries between right and wrong were very rigid, whereas boundaries between other social constructs could be broken down and reworked.