Performing Feminism
I always felt a kind of bemusement at the way my feminist literature and pink highlighters would look sprawled out next to my seven-inch black, thigh-high PVC boots.
As a pole dancer, burlesque artist and queer performer, I always had uncanny pleasure at the way my feminist academic background sat with my constant desire to take my clothes off in public.
At the same time as I was lacing up fancy corsets and applying body shimmer backstage at Sydney clubs, I was surrounded by law textbooks on sex discrimination and half written essays on sexual assault. In my head were a thousand thoughts from hundreds of hours of volunteer work around gender based violence at community legal centres, international non-government organisations, commercial law firms, academic institutions, non-profit charities and scholarly journals. In my past were countless occasions when I had feared or experienced violence, harm and discrimination because of my gender. I was armed with feminist theory and experience that taught me to question and dispute the representation of ourselves and genders in popular culture, and a resentment for the way narrow stereotypes are echoed throughout legal judgements, policy, advertising, journalism, and societal expectations that govern how we should look, act and behave. Even among my fake eyelashes, cheeky-cut hot pants and diamante jewels, my wardrobe seemed replete with reminders of my feminist core, one singlet reading (a tongue in cheek reference to militant radical feminism), ‘Newtown Lesbian Militia’!
And yet there I would sit, backstage in my right leg split, negotiating my anger towards sexism and my love for sexual expression, trying to reconcile these thoughts with my emerging, insatiable and exhibitionist desires to both dress up and undress. At buck’s parties, I would see strippers embodying modes of feminist resistance in their control, domination and making fun of their male subjects; from upside down, I saw pole dancers challenge expectations about female strength and passivity through defiant athletic and gymnastic skill; in interviews, I read showgirls deconstructing the way in which their depiction of ‘woman’ is merely an artifice, caricature and drag-like comedy; sex worker friends told me that during sessions, they would educate their clients about safer sex, female pleasure and employ kinky measures that subvert ideas about heteronormativity; in the BDSM community, I found levels of trust, communication, boundaries and an emphasis on safe spaces that were far more complex than I had encountered in any other commercial workplace environment; upon their podiums, exotic dancers experienced the celebration of their body as an extension of ancient goddess spirituality and commanding female archetypes; classical burlesque performers would often pay homage to courageous iconic female figures, while neo burlesque stars played with the bent, the grotesque, and the circus-like bizarre to create theatrical narratives that engaged and questioned audiences; and with their politically active performance art, queer performers used the concepts of strip, nudity and drag to play with ideas about the body, gender, trans and dyke stereotypes to voice new aesthetics, create new iconography and underscore larger social injustices.
Within this underground world of hidden treasures, I began to find a distinct pleasure in deviance. I was overwhelmed by a fervent sense of belonging to a subversive and historical collective of women who had long challenged heteropatriarchal restraints upon how they should behave, from the female midwives and healers burnt at the stake in the name of witchcraft for fear of their sexual power and knowledge, to the activism of feminist guerrilla theatre and sex workers manifesting their profession as educative, spiritual and political. I saw the multifaceted, innovative, radical and challenging performances around me as tools for social change, and heard myself defending erotic performance as a form of sexual expression, resistance, pedagogy, healing and activism. The words of my fridge magnet echoed in my head, ‘Well behaved women seldom make history’, and that thought made me feel wildly disruptive.
While we remain highly stigmatised, hidden and shunned, while we suffer discrimination, violence and harassment, and while we move beyond ‘good-girl’ categories of modest, monogamous, passive ideas of ‘appropriate’ female appearance and behaviour, erotic performers can use the act of undressing or themes of sexuality to navigate a path forward to confront and combat sexism, stereotype, and gender based harm; to assert active strategies of resistance to patriarchy and restrictive social mores; to transgress narrow ideas of sex and gender; to promote wider gender equality, open-mindedness and sexual freedom; and as release from the wounds of social taboos and prejudice about sex, nudity and gender nonconformity.
Indeed there remains a long path ahead for feminism in a society largely dominated by female sexual display for male audiences, and one which privileges certain brands of sexuality above others. In this context is vital to look towards the fostering of spaces that are respectful and safe for all women, which are gay friendly and include gender-diverse and open-minded audiences, which give creative licence to their performers to interpret eroticism and striptease in individual, unique, self-deterministic manners, and which showcase female, male, trans and gender-queer artists, as well as drag kings, drag queens and folk of all genders, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, classes, orientations, shapes and sizes. This way the profound and significant activism flourishing in small pockets of queer and underground subcultures can be embraced as a crucial site of resistance within larger feminist frameworks.
The hidden world of erotic performance in Sydney, with its carnivalesqueillusion and bacchanalian excess, remains perhaps one of the most underestimated and underutilised manifestations of feminism. The stage of erotic performance can act both as a window through which to examine wider constructions of gender and sexuality, and as a kaleidoscope, reflecting fractured, twisted, and bent subversions of cultural symbols and norms which advocate for wider social transformation.
