A striptease poetics.
Item
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Title
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A striptease poetics.
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Identifier
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AAI9315484
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identifier
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9315484
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Creator
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Liepe-Levinson, Katherine Helen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marvin Carlson
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | Dance | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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"A Striptease Poetics" explores a national sampling of middle class, heterosexual, female and male strip events through the ways in which they simultaneously uphold and transgress sex roles and other related cultural dictates. It examines what such a negotiation or doubling of social and erotic positions may reveal about the performance of dominant heterosexuality, gender, and female and male desire in this context. This study also questions assumptions about "pornographic" representations in terms of sexual agency or sexual subjectivity for women and men. Seven cities in the United States (Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Peoria, San Francisco, Washington D.C.) and one in Canada (Montreal) were selected as "field sites." More than sixty different strip clubs, bars, theatres, and sex emporiums were reviewed during the three years of this project.;The strip event's simultaneous upholding and breaking of traditional gender roles is discussed in terms of the urban locations of the strip bars and theatres; the exterior and interior designs of those places of performance; the dancer's use of costume and the body as costume; the choreography and structure of the different strip acts; and the roles, rituals; and games performed by the spectators.;This study concludes that within the transgressive 'poetics' of the strip show, female and male sexual interests are represented as active, dialogic conversations with the cultural imposition of sexual "normalcy"--and this includes the narrative of mainstream heterosexuality as a wholly "natural" entity. In these representations both female and male desires are depicted through schemas of exaggeration, excess, and the thrill and jeopardy of erotic "Possibilities." Strip events are not predicated upon the "total control" of the "socially powerful," but rather upon a giddy circulation of social and erotic positions which underscores the theatrical construction and potential mutability of these roles. While these representations do reflect aspects of the social oppression of women as a gendered class, they also suggest that dominant sexual pleasures and play and our inequitable social system do not operate as a single seamless system.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
