Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2017 Award for Outstanding Book, Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Overview

We have grown accustomed to corporate influence in retail outlets, restaurants, and even higher education-but what happens when corporations take over desire? The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business explores the changing world of striptease, tracing its path from the unruly underground to brightly lit, branded 'gentlemen's clubs.' Drawing on her own experience as an exotic dancer, Jessica Berson examines the ways that striptease embodies conflicting notions of race, class, and female sexuality, and how the exotic dance industry deploys these differences to codify and commodify our erotic imagination. Chain clubs, fitness programs, and music videos are moving exotic dance into the mainstream, stripping its historical potential to embody and express subversive desires-erotic and otherwise-and generate resistant modes of female erotic subjectivity. Through case studies including Boston's Combat Zone in the 1970s-80s, the development of lap dancing in London in the 1990s, and the triumph of corporate striptease in post-Giuliani New York City in the last decade,The Naked Result reveals an industry that increasingly eradicates individuality and agency in order to increase profits. Ultimately, The Naked Result argues that corporatization has cheerfully smothered the diversity of desire and expression for both dancers and customers, repackaging the most mysterious human emotions into easily branded experiences no more personal or powerful than those to be found in any themed restaurant or coffee mega-chain.

Full Product Details

9780199846207

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Naked Result is a knockout! Jessica Berson really puts out; excellent scholarship, superbly crafted words of body-based wisdom, and revealing information about today's exotic dance industries. I give this important and timely book my highest rating-two tassels way up! --Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., Former stripper, artist, activist, and author of Hardcore From the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance Berson writes as a dance scholar first and former exotic dancer second, intervening in tired debates about strippers' agency and expression. Providing detailed descriptions of the strippers' movement vocabularies, their places of employment, and their complex negotiations with each other, their clients, and club management, she establishes exotic dance as a commercial enterprise as well as a specific dance technique and style. --Kirsten Pullen, author of Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society and Like a Natural Woman: Spectacular Female Performance in Classical Hollywood The author addresses rarely-remarked but important topics in striptease, and elevates it from something mistaken for a novelty to its true relevancy in understanding human communication through movement. --Jo Weldon, Founder and Director, New York School of Burlesque and author of The Burlesque Handbook

Author Information

Jessica Berson teaches Dance Studies at Yale University, and has been a member of Dance and Drama faculties at Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and University of Exeter (UK). She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from University if Wisconsin-Madison and is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst. She lives in Boston with her husband and two sons.

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