Queering the inferno: Space, identity, and Kansas City’s jazz scene

Abstract

The music later called "jazz" flourished in Kansas City from the 1890s until the end of World War II, when city boss Tom Pendergast's patronage of jazz clubs ended with his incarceration for tax evasion. The city was home to a wide array of clubs, cabarets and performers from every corner of America. As a railroad terminus, the jazz scene in Kansas City was the last stop on performance circuits such as the Theatre Owner's Booking Association (TOBA). While famous people and events of the jazz scene remain in popular memory, many other important aspects of the complex jazz scene were silenced by the grand narrative of jazz history. What about the lives and experiences of brothel madams, drag performers, table dancers, and other citizens who do not appear in the written history of Kansas City jazz? This dissertation will attempt to excavate the lived experience of those Kansas City jazz scene citizens through an analysis of its geography of desires. Geography of desires is an attempt to understand the complexity of life in Kansas City's jazz scene in spatial terms. It is also an approach intended to answer an important question: did citizens who considered themselves marginalized in the Kansas City jazz scene engage in what Jose Esteban Munoz termed "worldmaking" in spaces they identified as "theirs?" Through the geography of desires, I theorize that cabarets, drag clubs and brothels in Kansas City also served as worldmaking spaces. In order to explore the role that jazz scene spaces played in worldmaking, this work attempts an intersectional analysis of the performance of gender, sexuality, class and race in Kansas City. The first chapter focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of the geography of desires approach. The second chapter examines the grand narrative of jazz history as it represents Kansas City. The third chapter explores the intersections of identity in the Pendergast machine. Gender transgression in the jazz scene is the focus of the fourth chapter. Prostitution and sex tourism are the center of chapter four. Finally, chapter five investigates the life of table singer Edna Mae Jacobs.