Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire

Book Description
Katherine Liepe-Levinson has spent three years researching heterosexual female and male striptease in North America. The result of this research is Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire: the first full length theoretically informed study of striptease.


About the Author
Katherine Liepe-Levinson has worked as a professional dancer, actor, choreographer, director, and playwright in both Europe and the United States. She has taught courses in theatre and performance studies for Hunter College, Empire State College, and most recently for Colgate University. She currently lives and works in New York City as a freelance writer, researcher, and educational consultant.


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"Strip Show offers an account of an unprecedented North American study of contemporary female and male strip shows. It particularly focuses on the contradictory sex roles, cultural positions, and performance practices of "straight" strip shows during their second heyday in the early 1990s." "Katherine Liepe-Levinson has spent three years researching heterosexual female and male striptease. Her travels took her to over seventy different strip bars, clubs, theatres, and sex emporiums ranging from elaborate lap-dancing and couch-dancing "gentlemen's" clubs in New York, Houston, and San Francisco; to Peoria's unisex cabaret where women strip for men downstairs, and men for women upstairs; to nightclubs in Montreal. The book is based on interviews with participants as well as Liepe-Levinson's own analyses of these events." The focus of this comprehensive and well-researched study is on the theatrical elements of striptease shows including choreography, costumes, and design. But a variety of methodologies are drawn upon to review the strip show's upholding and breaking of gender norms within the cultural and theatrical aspects of the events themselves.


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