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Taking an unprecedented, counterintuitive look at Americas conflict over sexuality, Naked Truth reveals how the attack on the exotic dance industry by the activist Christian Right threatens the separation of church and state and undermines our civil liberties.

This article instigates relations between an artistic creation and its composition with a political time by examining the artistic project Strip Tempo – contemporary stripteases (2018). The live version of the project premiered the same week Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. Its online configuration, Web-Strips (2021), took place during the pandemic. The text begins with a political and aesthetic contextualization of these performances; then, contributions from psychoanalysis and burlesque arts, along with the notion of performative archive, dialogue with the artistic proposition of stripteases. The conclusion affirms that the stripteases – in their live and remote versions – aesthetically and erotically summarize the trajectories of these contemporary artists. They also mobilize discussions about the naked body – whether as the last frontier of an ultra-conservative morality in Brazil, or as an experience that expresses an erotic drive in the arts.

This book offers an account of an unprecedented 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's research took her to over seventy 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 onetime duplex cabaret where women strip for men downstairs, and men for women upstairs; to the nightclubs of Montreal where female and male performers displayed the 'Full Monty'. Liepe-Levinson's intriguing, comprehensive study concentrates on the cultural and theatrical elements of the strip shows themselves including the geographic locations and interior designs of the clubs, the choreography and costumes of the dancers and the all-important participation of the audience. She draws upon a variety of methodologies as well as interviews with performers to explore how the strip show's cultural and theatrical aspects simultaneously uphold and break traditional sex roles. Her findings readily complicate several of the most prominent and prevalent theories about sexual representation, gender and desire.

Este artigo instiga relações entre uma criação artística e a sua composição com um tempo político em articulação com o projeto artístico baiano Strip Tempo – stripteases contemporâneos, em suas versões presencial e a digital, realizada na pandemia. Inicia-se com uma contextualização política e estética de tais performances; na sequência, conceitos da psicanálise e contribuições das artes burlescas dialogam com a proposta dos stripteases cênicos, além da noção de arquivo performativo. Como conclusão, afirma-se que os stripteases resumem, estética e eroticamente, os percursos de artistas contemporâneos e mobilizam discussões sobre o corpo nu, seja como última fronteira de uma moralidade ultraconservadora no Brasil de hoje ou como experiência de um desejo pulsional nas artes.

Strip clubs in Britain are declining due to changing social attitudes, local regulations, economic pressures, and competition from online entertainment.

Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other social and cultural processes is needed. In this discussion we argue that the following points are relevant and interlinked: changes to the nature of sexual commerce and sexual consumption as they become part of the marketplace; changes in social attitudes and the rise of 'respectability' in sexual commerce; the 'pleasure dynamic' amongst students; and changes in the higher education structure that place students as consumers as well as financially fragile. We set out a future research agenda given that this relationship is set to grow as the individual bares the cost of higher education.

Theatre is seldom considered a major social or theoretical mover today; however, since its inauguration in 2008, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre in Kreuzberg, Berlin, has been hugely instrumental in bringing the concept of postmigration into the public realm in Germany and beyond. Shermin Langhoff, the founding artistic director of the Ballhaus, explains that \"postmigrant means that we critically question the production and reception of stories about migration and about migrants which have been available up to now and that we view and produce these stories anew, inviting a new reception\". As scholars such as Yasemin Yildiz highlight, one dominant \"story\" produced about migrants in recent years has involved a shift in means of othering from the ethnonational to religious, making for example, \"Allah's daughters\" out of \"Turkish girls\". Changing the subject in this way, has also allowed a discourse to emerge which positions Muslim migrants as a threat to \"European\" sexual and gender rights; a discourse also considered under the heading \"sexual nationalism\". In this article I explore the narratives and gestures through which the theoretically aware postmigrant theatre as practised at the Ballhaus \"views and invites a new reception of\" this particular development. I suggest that not only does a broad view of the theatre's repertoire over its first decade reveal a long-standing concern with and intervention into the intersection of discourses on sexuality, gender, and migration, but also that repeated scenarios of both stripping as punishment and more playful striptease emerge as a dominant gesture or even gestus in the theatre's repertoire, even when sexuality or gender may not be central themes. Where might a gestic analytic, and a focus on viewing the theatre's practices as active generator, rather than object, of theory, take academic engagements with sexual nationalism and postmigration?

Although the face possesses potent social and symbolic meaning, the “dancing face” is rarely addressed in dance scholarship. In spite of its neglect, the face participates choreographically in the realization of aesthetic codes and embodied conventions that pertain to different dance styles and genres. I therefore turn to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1987) theory of “faciality” to understand the semiotic coding of the face in relation to the Busby Berkeley chorus girl. Although their work offers an important critique of universalist theorizations of facial expression, I argue that “facial choreography” offers scope to dismantle the legibility of the face that is produced through the overcoded “abstract machine of faciality.” To do so, I introduce the concept of a “choreographic interface” to explore how facial expression enters into a choreographic relationship with other faces and bodily territories. With this in mind, I explore two dancing bodies that engage the face in ways that complicate existing modalities of facial expression. I analyze a hip-hop battle and a neo-burlesque striptease number to show how the mobility and ambiguity of facial choreography opens a dialogic space through which meaning is generated and social and political critique take place.

This article both argues for and contests the discourses of transformation that characterize the production and reception of neo-burlesque striptease. Through an experiential, ethnographic, and critical methodology, I reflect on how this genre engenders performances of transformation through the passage of dress to undress, at the performer–spectator exchange, and through shifting corporeal values, changing representations of female eroticism and the reclaiming of a nostalgic femininity within the neo-burlesque mise-en-scène. Yet in line with critical debates in cultural studies, I seek to question the extent to which utopian notions of transformation occur beyond the level of the “performance text” to incorporate change in the economic and social realities of neo-burlesque performers and audiences. In response I argue that neo-burlesque striptease is a site of class privilege in which performers have the necessary economic and intellectual capital through which to stage a critique of the striptease body, which could not necessarily be replicated in other sites of production. Yet I also recognize that neo-burlesque performance offers important opportunities for personal and social transformation through the ways in which women experience their disrobed bodies in an affirmative public space and through the creative control they exercise in the construction of their bodily display.