ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative and playful, reflecting the ways in which this book has gone to the heart of feminist debates about the significance and meaning of erotic dance. The verb – to strip – can imply one of a number of things: first, and in the perhaps more conventional sense, it can simply imply a body that strips its clothing. This could imply a sense of agency, an act of actively stripping, either for the dancer’s own ends or for the visual pleasure of others (or both). A second reading of the title could imply something more violent in a metaphorical sense – bodies can be ‘stripped’ – something is done to them – in the sense that they are undressed by another’s gaze, stripped of their power, rights or liberties. As I have critically discussed, this second argument is a crucial concern of radical feminists, in which erotic dance, and sex work more widely, is conceived of as the ultimate objectification of women’s bodies by men. Within this book I have tried to indicate the limitations of this binary understanding of the power relations of erotic dance and the importance of reframing these conceptions. Within this chapter I draw out some of the key and the ‘queer’ moments that I perceive to be central to dancers’ and customers’ experiences within nonconventional erotic dance spaces, as well as being the moments through which we can think about the contestability of normative power relations. I make links between participants’ definitions of both venues as in some senses representing ‘women’s spaces’, and the tensions with this notion; the complex ways in which customers and dancers negotiate and exercise a sexual ‘gaze’; and how the particular venues that dancers work within is crucial to their ability to be able to experience autonomy through their work role. I highlight how participants challenge and negotiate heteronormative gender and sexual power relations, and what this indicates for the theorising of gender and sexual power relations more widely. In particular, I indicate the subtle ways in which power operates in these erotic dance spaces. The experiences of participants within these spaces are often more complex than one-dimensional conceptions of gendered power might assume. Overall, I argue that seeking to understand the performance and spectatorship of erotic dance through a queer feminist lens does not only provide room to examine the potential fluidity and contestability of gender and sexual
power relations in the interactions between performers and spectators, but it also provides scope for considering the implications of women’s and men’s engagement with heteronormative discourses more widely.
