This is the first collection of original essays, articles, and images from authors, activists, artists, and scholars that grapple with the explicit body and the staging of sex across multiple spaces – from burlesque to drag, to sex work, to celebrity culture.
Sex on Stage uncovers how gender and sexuality collide on stage in dynamic, dramatic, and thought-provoking ways. By taking a broad view of sex and the stage, this book tracks influences across the underground, marginalised, and the mainstream, from ‘high’ contemporary live art to the ‘low’ of entertainment.
Across these mediums, the staging of sex pushes against decorums of respectability, instead flaunting the body to shock, to entertain, to tell stories, and to display a new kind of gender expression. The subjects and contributors included in this collection inhabit their bodies—in fact, demand the agency of the body—in self-authored ways. Gender and sexuality here are performative, and what comes into being challenges traditional constructions of both femininity and sexuality. Case studies include South-East Asian stereotypes in burlesque performance and an exploration of Latinx performance artist Xandra Ibarra.
ACT I: Staging Culture, Negotiating Sex
The Suitcase - Stacey Clare (Independent Scholar)
Selling Out: Art, Stripping, and Sexual Desire on the Public Stage - Marissa Vigneault (Assistant Professor, Utah State University, USA)
Titillation: Radical Visibility - Emily Underwood-Lee (Associate Professor of Performance Studies, University of South Wales, UK)
Permission to be Nude: Kim Kardashian West and the Body as Art Object - Linda Pittwood (Exhibition Project Manager, Museum of Science and Industry)
How Not to Put a Pastie on a Lactating Breast: A Roundtable Discussion about Motherhood and Burlesque Bodies - Lola Montgomery (Senior Lecturer, SAE Institute, UK)
Reading Nana, Théatre des Variétés - Sharon Kivland (Reader, Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
Lil Cotton Flower is… The Marvelous Tar Baby - Ra/Malika Imhotep (Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
INTERMISSION:E.L.S.C. Files - Julie Cook (Photographer)
ACT II: Activating Sex on Stage
Stripping off Shame and Revealing Hot Joy - Legs Malone (Performer)
What Pleasure Actually Means: An Interview with Intimacy Director Yarit Dor - Alexander Millington (PhD Researcher, De Montfort University, UK), with Yarit Dor (Independent Scholar)
Pole Dancing Academic: Decompartmentalising the Personal, Sexual and Professional while Blending Pole Dance and Research Careers - Carolina Are (Visiting Lecturer, City, University London and London College of Communications, UK)
The Inheritance: Queer Sex in the Theatre of HIV/AIDS - Ash John (PhD Researcher, University of Bristol, UK)
The World Is My Stage - Dawn Crandell (Performer)
The Only Way Out is Through VIP: Discovering Genderqueer Identities through High Femme Strip Club Performances - Ella Gabriel Mason (MFA Candidate, Temple University, USA)
INTERMISSION: The Whoopee Club - Lara Clifton (Producer) and Tamara Tyrer (Artist) with Photographs by Sarah Ainslie (Photographer)
ACT III: Explicit Bodies on Stage
Gesture, Aesthetics, and Dreaming: Building a World Without Rape in ‘Choreographies of Disclosure: A Conversation’ - Julia Harvard (Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Berkeley, USA), and Jadelynn St Dre (Performer)
Consuming Asiatic Femininity through Foodlesque—Exploring East-Asian Exoticism through Calamity Chang’s Model Mi-Nori-ty Roll - Julia Matias (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto, Canada)
‘The Audience is My Source of Hate’: Xandra Ibarra and Fucking Whiteness - Erin Rachel Kaplan (Lecturer at University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
If in Doubt, Just Body Roll: Stories of Glitter, Fire and Lube - Zahra Stardust (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
The Queen of Filth: Rose Wood Comes Clean with Joe E. Jeffreys - Joe E. Jeffreys (Adjunct Professor, New York University, USA), with Rose Wood (Performer)
Bibliography
Index
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