Abstract: This thesis aims to generate qualitative and distinctly Australian data towards feminist and queer literature on the capacity of erotic performance to inform larger cultural, practical and policy questions about addressing gender-based harm. The thesis draws on the author’s own experiences working in the adult industry, and is based on over 30 interviews with strippers, pole dancers, burlesque artists, sex workers and queer performers in Sydney. It aims to complicate popular feminist accounts of adult entertainment, illustrating how lived feminism can manifest onstage whilst examining the parameters that constrain performers in their material practice. In the spirit of ‘appreciative inquiry’ (Cooperrider, Sorensen Jr., Whitney and Yaeger, 2000), it emphasises commonalities in moments of agency, activism and resistance across a range of performance mediums, with view to fostering knowledge-sharing, mentoring and networking among women. It explores fractured feminist scholarship and performers’ diverse relationships with feminism, and considers how to best foster productive dialogue between practitioners and theoreticians of adult material. To this end, the thesis investigates concepts of representation, translation and interpretation. It details experiences that blur boundaries of subject and object, and defy readings of objectification, commodification or passivity. The voices demonstrate how women, as consumers, participants and directors of erotic material, experiment with both artifice and authenticity, employ the stage as a political platform, and share a working knowledge of gender politics and sexual health backstage. Meanwhile, performers discuss how they are affected by and implicated in systems that delineate bodies according to age, size, sexuality, gender, class and race, which restrict their movement onstage, limit their mobility in the industry, and produce hierarchies of ‘sexable’ bodies, styles and sexual intelligibility. Feminist Stripper listens to performers’ own recipes for resistance – their individual strategies for balancing creativity, financial interests and political motivations while maintaining enjoyment in their profession and constantly navigating stigma, discrimination and public perception. It argues that precisely because of their irregular, nomadic qualities, erotic performers are a powerful vehicle to disseminate feminist consciousness.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Because of their irregular, nomadic qualities, erotic performers are a powerful vehicle to disseminate feminist consciousness, defying readings of objectification, commodification or passivity
Feminist Stripper, A Call to Arms: Convention and Counter-Practice in Erotic Performance. Zahra Zsuzsanna Stardust. Master Thesis, Sydney Univ., 2011. https://www.academia.edu/6848847
Abstract: This thesis aims to generate qualitative and distinctly Australian data towards feminist and queer literature on the capacity of erotic performance to inform larger cultural, practical and policy questions about addressing gender-based harm. The thesis draws on the author’s own experiences working in the adult industry, and is based on over 30 interviews with strippers, pole dancers, burlesque artists, sex workers and queer performers in Sydney. It aims to complicate popular feminist accounts of adult entertainment, illustrating how lived feminism can manifest onstage whilst examining the parameters that constrain performers in their material practice. In the spirit of ‘appreciative inquiry’ (Cooperrider, Sorensen Jr., Whitney and Yaeger, 2000), it emphasises commonalities in moments of agency, activism and resistance across a range of performance mediums, with view to fostering knowledge-sharing, mentoring and networking among women. It explores fractured feminist scholarship and performers’ diverse relationships with feminism, and considers how to best foster productive dialogue between practitioners and theoreticians of adult material. To this end, the thesis investigates concepts of representation, translation and interpretation. It details experiences that blur boundaries of subject and object, and defy readings of objectification, commodification or passivity. The voices demonstrate how women, as consumers, participants and directors of erotic material, experiment with both artifice and authenticity, employ the stage as a political platform, and share a working knowledge of gender politics and sexual health backstage. Meanwhile, performers discuss how they are affected by and implicated in systems that delineate bodies according to age, size, sexuality, gender, class and race, which restrict their movement onstage, limit their mobility in the industry, and produce hierarchies of ‘sexable’ bodies, styles and sexual intelligibility. Feminist Stripper listens to performers’ own recipes for resistance – their individual strategies for balancing creativity, financial interests and political motivations while maintaining enjoyment in their profession and constantly navigating stigma, discrimination and public perception. It argues that precisely because of their irregular, nomadic qualities, erotic performers are a powerful vehicle to disseminate feminist consciousness.
Abstract: This thesis aims to generate qualitative and distinctly Australian data towards feminist and queer literature on the capacity of erotic performance to inform larger cultural, practical and policy questions about addressing gender-based harm. The thesis draws on the author’s own experiences working in the adult industry, and is based on over 30 interviews with strippers, pole dancers, burlesque artists, sex workers and queer performers in Sydney. It aims to complicate popular feminist accounts of adult entertainment, illustrating how lived feminism can manifest onstage whilst examining the parameters that constrain performers in their material practice. In the spirit of ‘appreciative inquiry’ (Cooperrider, Sorensen Jr., Whitney and Yaeger, 2000), it emphasises commonalities in moments of agency, activism and resistance across a range of performance mediums, with view to fostering knowledge-sharing, mentoring and networking among women. It explores fractured feminist scholarship and performers’ diverse relationships with feminism, and considers how to best foster productive dialogue between practitioners and theoreticians of adult material. To this end, the thesis investigates concepts of representation, translation and interpretation. It details experiences that blur boundaries of subject and object, and defy readings of objectification, commodification or passivity. The voices demonstrate how women, as consumers, participants and directors of erotic material, experiment with both artifice and authenticity, employ the stage as a political platform, and share a working knowledge of gender politics and sexual health backstage. Meanwhile, performers discuss how they are affected by and implicated in systems that delineate bodies according to age, size, sexuality, gender, class and race, which restrict their movement onstage, limit their mobility in the industry, and produce hierarchies of ‘sexable’ bodies, styles and sexual intelligibility. Feminist Stripper listens to performers’ own recipes for resistance – their individual strategies for balancing creativity, financial interests and political motivations while maintaining enjoyment in their profession and constantly navigating stigma, discrimination and public perception. It argues that precisely because of their irregular, nomadic qualities, erotic performers are a powerful vehicle to disseminate feminist consciousness.
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