02 Jun Embodying Stripping: A Spatial Analysis of the Gendered and Sexualized Performances and (Hetero)performativities of Strip Club Locales
Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo (IHC Senior Fellow)
Wednesday, June 2 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Building upon the vast amount of work on interaction-based perspectives on stripping, this talk will incorporate two areas of inquiry that have been absent in the literature: the performance or embodiments of stripping and performativity or the larger context in which stripping takes place. Using her concepts of (hetero)performativity and (homo)performativity or the underlying heteronormative and/or homonormative sexual field (Green 2008) of spaces within the sites, Hidalgo will analyze and discuss the processes and dynamic differences between the peep show and typical strip club locale. Addressing identities as a process, she will also discuss how the ongoing and multi-varied process of embodied interactions shift and change in different settings and impact how sexuality and gender are performed, understood, and challenged by dancers, clients and other actors within the locales. While the general spatial dynamics of both spaces are characterized as heteroperformative and heteronormative, Hidalgo’s work addresses whether or not the actual spatial dynamics of the peep show (windows separating dancers from clients) and sexual dynamics of the dancers (queer identity is often discussed as accepted and normative) opened up space for transgressing the heteroperformativity of the space. Prof. Hidalgo received her PhD in 2009 from UC Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department and MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research addresses the spatio-temporal embodied dynamics of genders and sexualities in social relations. In addition to her ongoing research on stripping, she is currently completing her book entitled, Expressions on a Dance Floor: Geographies of Genders and Sexualities in Bangkok Nightclubbing.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Senior Fellows Program.