ABSTRACT
Erotic dance is one of the most contentious issues in feminist debates today, both within academic contexts and within feminist activism and political activities. It is also a source of fascination in media and popular cultural representations. Yet, we currently know little about those who perform erotic dance within ‘nonconventional’ strip venues; namely those dancers who perform for women customers, or the experiences of these women spectators themselves. This book is a result of an investigation into the experiences of women and men erotic dancers and their women customers in leisure venues in the UK. The research is theorised from a feminist and queer perspective and speaks to key debates surrounding the power relations of erotic dance, simultaneously relating these to debates about the sex industry more widely. Through ethnographies of a lesbian leisure venue and a male strip show, my aim is to advance current debates about the gender and sexual politics of erotic dance that often assume that only women perform erotic dance, and only men watch. Through providing a distinctive view on issues including the politics of looking and being watched; sexual objectification; the ‘work’ of erotic dance; questions of power; and the embodied experiences of dancers and customers in these spaces, the book develops a more complex account of people’s experiences in erotic dance venues, highlighting the tensions around exercising agency in commercial sexual encounters. Is there anything distinctive or transformative about the performance and spectatorship of erotic dance in non-conventional erotic dance spaces? Erotic Performance and Spectatorship explores this question through examining the ways in which dancers and customers construct and contest meanings surrounding their experiences in these spaces. The complex power relations which operate within both non-conventional erotic dance spaces are highlighted, to consider the moments in which participants push at the boundaries of normative ideas concerning gendered identities, sexual experiences and workplace roles. In doing so, the book explores the potential fluidity and multiplicity of identities that can be imagined and enacted in these different venues, to see how much crossover there is between dancers and audiences at ostensibly heterosexual and lesbian venues. Theorised through a queer feminist lens, these experiences are drawn upon to think further about the ways in which participants in erotic dance
venues might experience and perform less heteronormative, binary identities, sometimes at the same time that they are negotiating and competing against the salience of heteronormative discourses.
