Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire

ISBN-13: 9780415173810 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 268 str.

Katherine Liepe-Levinson

Opis

This text offers an account of a North American study of contemporary female and male strip shows. It particularly focuses on the contradictory sex roles, cultural positions, and performance practices of straight strip shows during their second heyday in the early 1990s. Katherine Liepe-Levinson has spent three years researching heterosexual female and male striptease. Her travels took her to over 70 different strip bars, clubs, theatres and sex emporiums ranging from elaborate lap-dancing and couch-dancing gentlemen's clubs in New York, Houston, and San Francisco; to Peoria's unisex cabaret where women strip for men downstairs, and men for women upstairs; to nightclubs in Montreal. The book is based on interviews with participants as well as Liepe-Levinsons's own analyses of these events. The focus of this study is on the theatrical elements of striptease shows including choreography, costumes, and design; but a variety of methodologies are drawn upon to review the strip show's upholding and breaking of gender norms within the cultural and theatrical aspects of the events themselves.

Recenzje

'Insightful, informative, and as provocative as the art form it considers. Strip Show is a refreshing book, which seeks to illuminate a subject too often avoided or misunderstood, highlighting the professional theatricality of some of the world's most daring performers.' - Neil Eckersley, Manchester on Stage

Spis treści

List of illustrations, Acknowledgements, Introduction: Strip show: Performances of gender and desire, 1 Urban locations of desire: A tale of five cities, 2 Interiors, 3 Costume dramas and sexual subjectivity, 4 Choreography I: The basic moves, 5 Choreography II: Structure, pleasure, and “confessional” narratives of the body, 6 Performing spectators: The pleasure of mimetic jeopardy, 7 Epilogue as intermezzo: The saga of the strip show, or the battles over sexual representation rage on…, Appendix, Notes, Select bibliography, Index

O autorze

Katherine Liepe-Levinson