Stripped: reading the erotic body

Abstract

Maggie M. Werner’s debut monograph, Stripped, is a timely read for scholars of all stripes, providing tools to interpret erotic communication in an era of resurgent sex panic. Building on 15 years of autoethnographic and ethnographic research at neo-burlesque shows and strip clubs—including interviews she conducted with performers, fieldnotes produced through participant observation, and a close read of digital publications—Werner follows Branstetter in characterizing her work as a form of “promiscuous research,” refusing the sanctity of tradition in favor of “sleeping around with all the other disciplines.” Her work is squarely concerned with expanding what rhetoric deems permissible to study—often critiquing its logocentrism— and draws on insights from Gender and Sexuality Studies, Performance Studies, and Sociology. Expanding on nascent scholarship regarding “rhetoric of the body,” Werner notes how there is a conspicuous absence of the body in rhetorical criticism and, when it is present, the focus is not typically on sexuality; indeed, much work deals with “rhetoric about the body” rather than conceiving of “bodies as generators of rhetoric” themselves. In attempting to theorize “the body’s material, symbolic communication,” Werner cautions against the application of logocentric methodologies to rhetoric that exceeds textuality, arguing that it “subordinates gestural communication to the linguistic,” deprioritizing the kinesthetic and erotic messages conveyed by bodies. Though her work focuses specifically on moments of intentional erotic communication (neo-burlesque, stripping, and sex work activism), she frames her research as an “invitation or provocation to scholars of the rhetorical body,” providing a set of heuristics for rhetoricians to critique the body without reducing it to discourse. Notably, the first three chapters do not make an explicit feminist intervention in debates over sex work; rather, they work to “disrupt oppressive/empowering as the sole (or even enlightening) critical standard for analyzing erotic performance.” While openly admitting her feminist slant, Werner argues that “engaging in body criticism” is necessary to counter “a rhetoric of existential denial” by insisting on the lives lived beneath debates. In chapter 1,Werner situates her analysis of embodied erotic rhetoric in the canon of delivery. Working through Aristotle and Cicero, Werner notes how the oral tradition treats the masculine subject as its unspoken default. Instead of uncritically extending this tradition, she places herself alongside “feminist recoveries of delivery” in considering “those performances that classical rhetoric would not.” Through analyzing neo-burlesque shows, she argues that delivery is not merely how a message is received by an audience but rather a series of coproduced meanings as “many performers build interaction with audience members into their acts, break the fourth wall, and improvise moments based on audience feedback.” After carefully tracing the history of neo-burlesque shows, its counterpart in vaudeville, and its relation to minstrelsy, Werner outlines four topoi of delivery: genre, body, space, and audience. Genre designates the kind of performance, which helps distinguish between “different types of stripping,” noting that the artistic appraisal of neo-burlesque coincides with the denigration of club stripping because of the way the respective genres are differently classed. Body characterizes both “movement, clothes, and voice” but also “race, gender, and ethnicity.” Space “considers the overlapping questions of who is authorized to speak (body), and in what way (genre), and to whom (audience).” Audience speaks not simply to those witnessing a performance but an interactive dynamic where “audiences and rhetors cocreate discourse.” Chapter 2 elaborates on the relationship between genre criticism and erotic dance. Rather than bifurcate neo-burlesque and topless club stripping into essentially discrete categories,