ABSTRACT
What is so perilous, then, in the fact that people speak, and that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that? (Foucault, 1972)
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? (West, in Sherman, 1933)2
Mae West, American playwright, screenwriter, and classic Hollywood film star, became a figure of both controversy and popularity in the 1920s with the production of three off-Broadway plays titled Sex (1926), The Drag (1927), and The Pleasure Man (1928). The homosexual characters and narratives of West's plays incited criminal charges of obscenity, indecency, and immorality against West and her theatre crews, indicted by the Grand Jury of the county of New York (West, 1997, p.205). Censorship and celebrity followed West through her film career spanning from the 1930s to the 1970s, her television and radio appearances from the 1930s to the 1950s, and her return to playwriting and the theatre in the 1940s,
The brazen, buxom blonde West is famous for her sexual innuendo. With lines like 'Anytime you got nothing to do-and lots of time to do it-come on up' (My Little Chickadee, 1940), she established herself as a sharp-witted, provocative and transgressive parleuse. Her quips continue to be, irresistibly, repeated in various commercial and colloquial forms. To date, however, there has been little written explicitly about the connection of this kind of 'irresistible repeatability' to the performativity of speech acts. In this essay, the example of West's sexual innuendo becomes an irresistible occasion through which sexual innuendo and its performative repeatability are explored.
