ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Cowie argues that “there is a confusion about sexual arousal-not the fact that it occurs, but what produces it.” She rhetorically asks her readers whether it is provoked by some kind of “pure denotation”—such as a spectator’s biological response to a stripper’s nude body-or whether “it is stimulated by the scenario of presentation, by the mise en scène and implied narrative?”.3 Following Freud and the Laplanche and Pontalis schools of psychology, Cowie suggests that sexual arousal is indeed founded upon biological drives. However, these urges-and, for that matter, all of our varying sexualities-manifest in conscious life through our ability to fantasize-to imagine entire scenarios that we can inhabit. Panoramas of desire, wrought from both social and psychical components, reveal that fantasizers are as intensely involved with all the accoutrements that make up the scene as they are with specific objects of desire.4 Pointedly, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Frank states that the pleasure and satisfaction of her customers lay not only in scrutinizing the nudity of the performers as detached observers, but in experiencing the “change of scenery” from everyday life that the club setting provided.5
