title: The Incredible Inga: A field guide to losing your clothes and finding yourself
Creators: name: Woodrow, Ingrid
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: zuihitsu
subject: creative arts
subject: exegesis

description: This thesis, The Incredible Inga / A Field Guide to Losing Your Clothes and Finding Yourself, is a creative arts-based research project. It comprises two complementary elements: a creative artefact in the form of a memoir and accompanying exegetical material. The creative artefact, The Incredible Inga, takes the form of a series of vignettes engaging with recent studies concerning the liminal space between fiction and autobiography. The exegetical components that make up A Field Guide to Losing your Clothes and Finding Yourself—a work of creative nonfiction—are blended throughout the creative material. Thus, the thesis in its entirety draws on and blends elements of the Japanese literary concept of zuihitsu; artists’/writers’ journals and relevant contemporary literary and creative practice theory, specifically concerned with problematising the relationship between life writing and fiction. The blurring of generic boundaries and the application of metafictional strategies to contemporary creative and scholarly writing are also key scholarly concerns. The project draws on first-hand experience to produce my take on a number of ‘sex worker memoirs’ which emerged during the early 2000s, spearheaded by the likes of Lily Burana’s Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America (2001) Elisabeth Eaves’ Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping (2002) and Kate Holden’s In My Skin (2005). The project was conceived as a fictive ‘stripper memoir’, the protagonist of which is a stripper named Inga, a former journalist and novelist with a Master’s degree who quit her job as a newspaper sub-editor in a regional Queensland town and became a stripper. Like the protagonist of Elizabeth Hardwick’s ‘genre-bending’ 1979 ‘novel’ Sleepless Nights, whose protagonist’s circumstances follow the known contours of its author’s life, Inga’s journey parallels watershed moments in mine and in the history of the northern Queensland town of Mackay during a six-year period I spent there in the early 2000s. Both the creative artefact and the exegesis form a hybrid text, with each component infused with the notion that becoming a dancer enables my fictive self to reconnect with her sense of identity as a writer—in short, a demonstration of how she loses her clothes and finds herself. In a textual sense, this takes the form of a self-reflexive literary performance along the lines of Sophie Calle’s “The Striptease” (2000), from her artist’s book Double Game in which she inscribed the motif of a stripper as her performative self with a compelling statement on her own identity as both an author and subject of her work. This arts-based research project engages with existing social science-based studies and popular works of literature in the field but also seeks to present a more multifaceted view of the industry and the people who work within it. By positioning my project as an insider’s perspective into a taboo space, rather than casting value judgements for or against exotic dance or limiting the scope of work to a single research question per se, the work instead aspires to the goals eloquently described by theorists Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner: “The purpose of arts-based research is to raise significant questions and engender conversations rather than proffer final meanings” (2011, p. 166).