Sex on Stage: Performing the Body Politic
Author: Sally, Lynn; Carr, Alison J
ISBN: 9781350443655
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year first published: 08 May 2025
Pages: 240 Format: Paperback / softback
This is the first collection of original essays, articles, and images from authors, activists, artists, and scholars that grapple with the explicit body and the staging of sex across multiple spaces from burlesque to drag, to sex work, to traditional theatre.
Sex on Stage uncovers how gender and sexuality collide on stage in dynamic, dramatic, and thought-provoking ways. By taking a broad view of sex and the stage, this book tracks influences across the underground, marginalised, and the mainstream, from 'high' contemporary live art to the 'low' of entertainment.
Across these mediums, the staging of sex pushes against decorums of respectability, instead flaunting the body to shock, to entertain, to tell stories, and to display a new kind of gender expression. The subjects and contributors included in this collection inhabit their bodies in fact, demand the agency of the body in self-authored ways. Gender and sexuality here are performative, and what comes into being challenges traditional constructions of both femininity and sexuality.
ISBN: 9781350443655
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year first published: 08 May 2025
Pages: 240 Format: Paperback / softback
This is the first collection of original essays, articles, and images from authors, activists, artists, and scholars that grapple with the explicit body and the staging of sex across multiple spaces from burlesque to drag, to sex work, to traditional theatre.
Sex on Stage uncovers how gender and sexuality collide on stage in dynamic, dramatic, and thought-provoking ways. By taking a broad view of sex and the stage, this book tracks influences across the underground, marginalised, and the mainstream, from 'high' contemporary live art to the 'low' of entertainment.
Across these mediums, the staging of sex pushes against decorums of respectability, instead flaunting the body to shock, to entertain, to tell stories, and to display a new kind of gender expression. The subjects and contributors included in this collection inhabit their bodies in fact, demand the agency of the body in self-authored ways. Gender and sexuality here are performative, and what comes into being challenges traditional constructions of both femininity and sexuality.
