Erotic resistance : performance, art, and activism in San Francisco strip clubs, 1960s-2010s
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa's dissertation, "Erotic Resistance: Performance, Art, and Activism in San Francisco Strip Clubs, 1960s-2010s, " highlights the contributions of women of color, queer women, and trans women who were instrumental at key moments in the city's history concerning the sex industry. Since the "feminist sex wars" of the 1980s, feminists have debated whether or not sex work empowers or victimizes women, a question that this dissertation takes up through a performance studies lens. Recent scholarship by and about women of color in the emerging field of "feminist pornography" studies has brought these debates up to date, such as Mireille Miller-Young's and Celine Parreñas-Shimizu's groundbreaking scholarship about black and Asian women in the pornographic film industry throughout the twentieth century. Other scholars in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, and dance studies (Frank, Egan, Liepe-Levinson, Berson, and Brooks) have examined the strip club industry to engage the "feminist sex wars" as they were once called. These scholars have significantly moved the debates forward, but have yet to explicitly examine the role of queer women and women of color in the context of live performance with regard to the question of victimization versus empowerment. How can perceptions about these women change in light of the previous "sex wars" as well as the wars between and among the sexes in the live encounter of strip club performances in which race, gender, and sexuality are improvised and power is exchanged? This project responds to this question with a focus on this triply marginalized demographic in the context of San Francisco's strip club industry. It investigates critical debates concerning the labor of sex work which Otálvaro-Hormillosa discusses in light of activist labor, artistic labor, and emotional labor—each of which are central themes in the fields of performance studies, as well as critical studies in race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in San Francisco, although cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. For the first time in U.S. history, artist-activist-dancers in the city led successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize in the strip club industry in the 1990s. Using diverse methods including ethnography, visual and performance analysis, and historiography, Otálvaro-Hormillosa relates these phenomena through archival materials, artworks, and original interviews she conducted with three generations of women who have performed in San Francisco's industry since the 1960s. Through an analysis of materials by and/or about the San Francisco dancers she interviewed, the project seeks to open up the fraught relationship between sex work and "feminism." The performances examined took place in galleries, strip clubs, and on the street. As such, they call into question key terms such as "feminism" and "performance." Foregrounding the voices of the performers interviewed for the project, the dissertation resignifies stripper bodies to mitigate the stigma attached to their performances while trying to account for the power at the intersection of sex work, feminism, and race.