Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire, and: Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire (review)

If the wave of reality-based television shows is any indication, every American wants to take off his or her clothes in public. Articulating what striptease means in a book-length academic study, though, is a less popular—and more difficult—activity. One reason is that, despite changes in recent decades, the division between highbrow and lowbrow remains a strong presence in many performance studies and theatre departments. Another is that, historically, women practiced striptease in diverse, out of the way, working-class venues about which information is difficult to obtain. Also, striptease is so different from any other extant form of popular entertainment that theatre historians and theatre studies academics have not really known where to look or what to look for. Finally, the anti-pornography feminists of the sixties have a long reach. Using queer and Marxist theory, Robert Allen's Horrible Prettiness went some way toward pulling burlesque (striptease's predecessor) out of the hands of anti-porn feminists, but Allen had little scholarly company.

Two new books about striptease reveal the challenges the next generation of scholars faces as they reframe striptease as a "feminist" or "democratic" act, or at least one that is not merely misogynist. The pair use almost diametrically opposed strategies, and, to their credit, both books claim that striptease presents a more complicated idea of sexuality and fantasy life than scholars have previously recognized. In Strip Show, Katherine Liepe-Levinson analyzes Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's shutdown of strip clubs in 1990s New York and shutdowns in other cities in order to defend stripping against a canvas of American puritanism. British media scholar Brian McNair's Striptease Culture, as the title announces, aims to show how "striptease culture" has "democratized" everything from Jeff Koons's art to our private lives. According to McNair, we are all very much better off thanks to striptease culture.

Liepe-Levinson, a graduate of New York University's Department of Performance Studies and a former professional dancer, has meticulously charted her book. She treats the reader to a tour of strip clubs in five cities, as well as to an old-fashioned formal analysis. This includes strip club zoning (the space around the theatre); choreography; the stage space of strip bars, costume, themes, and narratives; and the spectator-audience relationship. Liepe-Levinson wrote this book specifically in the context of Giuliani-era New York, and some of her nostalgia for the old, seedy Times Square seems a little out of date in post-9/11 America, a fact that she herself writes about in the conclusion.

Strip Show is most compelling when Liepe-Levinson talks about how striptease presents certain so-called confessional narratives of the body. She draws from both theoretical literature and first-hand interviews to describe what she calls the "poetics of the stripshow" (15). Of course Liepe-Levinson, trying to explode the pornography-antipornography dichotomy in Women's Studies, early on frames her book as a struggle over sexual representation. Using theorists as diverse as Clifford Geertz and Jacques Lacan, she describes striptease as neither misogynist nor feminist, although always provocative and threatening to public officials everywhere. She demolishes reformers' long-held arguments that strip clubs make neighborhoods deteriorate.

This book contains both nuanced feminist ethnography and close readings of the act of stripping, focusing on what it means in American life. Carefully positioning herself as a white, academic, straight woman, Liepe-Levinson is best when using formal analyses to observe that striptease relies for its appeal as much, if not more, on ribald humor mocking social mores as on Eros. Drawing on Laura Kipnis's study of pornography, Bound and Gagged, Liepe-Levinson contends that striptease contains a distinct, thrilling presence by presenting a startling erotic quiddity...