Erotic Resistance celebrates the erotic performance cultures that have shaped San Francisco. It preserves the memory of the city's bohemian past and its essential role in the development of American adult entertainment by highlighting the contributions of women of color, queer women, and trans women who were instrumental in the city's labor history, as well as its LGBT and sex workers' rights movements. In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in the city for the first time in the US, though cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. In the 1990s, stripper-artist-activists led the first successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize. Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa uses visual and performance analysis, historiography, and ethnographic research, including participant observation as both performer and spectator and interviews with legendary burlesquers and strippers, to share this remarkable story.
Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, PhD, is an artist-scholar who teaches and writes about art and activism, queer of color critique, erotic performance, and the intersections of mindfulness and creative practice. She holds a doctorate in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University, where she currently leads the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning.
"With heart, flesh, and soul, this excellent book is committed to women of color, queer women, cis women, and trans women who wield a powerful erotic resistance through sexual performance. Along with rich engagements with critical performance and visual theory, we are treated to excellent storytelling, an innovative queer herstoriography, a kick-ass feminist porn archive, and the author herself as flexibly scholar, artist, and 'alchemized gendered being.' A feminist ethno-pornography and porno-ethnography, Erotic Resistance carefully engages with those who exploit and repurpose the performativity of heterosexuality as a tool for resilience, creative resistance, and financial gain. Here you will meet legendary burlesquers, strippers, artists, and activists working in the sex industry who intersect practices of performance, art, and activism to offer deeply sensual and explicitly scholarly innovation."—Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment
"More than a history strip and burlesque subcultures, more than a participant-observer ethnography of an underground community of dancers, Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa’s Erotic Resistance is a call to action. It remembers the radical potentials of San Francisco’s storied past, not with a sense of nostalgia, but in service to a present moment that seeks to counter the city’s hollowing out by advanced capitalism, and to fill that evacuated space with something better."—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution
"In Erotic Resistance, Otálvaro-Hormillosa creates her own hyper-local porn archive to surface the artistic and activist contributions of queer, trans, and racialized erotic dancers in San Francisco’s infamous nightlife scene. Drawing on historical research, contemporary interviews, and performance ethnography, she has produced an intimate queer herstoriography of SF queer stripper communities that affirms agency, politics, and pleasure."—Juana María Rodríguez, author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex
"Erotic Resistance narrates the recent history and ongoing reorganization of San Francisco through its strippers, through precarious dance workers who revitalize their clients' lives (and the city) with their bodies, affects, and souls. Simultaneously a brilliant work of urban history, a deep analysis of visual and filmic archives, and a rigorous performance ethnography, Erotic Resistance foregrounds the names, voices, and actions of strippers as theorists, as careful thinkers who parse through the imbrication of labor, urban politics, gender, sexuality, race, and selfhood. All the while, Otálvaro-Hormillosa serves as an expert guide and curator who prevents readers from feeling like unwanted voyeurs; instead she interpellates us as valuable witnesses to San Francisco's changing sexual geographies."—Kareen Khubchandani, author of Decolonize Drag
"Writing against the grain of traditional critical geography studies or historiography, in Erotic Resistance Otálvaro-Hormillosa renders a fifty-year history of San Francisco through the body. Engaging the erotic performances and testimonies of strip dancers, this monograph offers a counternarrative to San Francisco as only the home of dot.com, big tech, and AI—as a disembodied assemblage of technologies. Instead, this rich performance ethnography centers agential women's bodies—of the researcher and her interlocutors—to highlight a political economy of erotic cultural workers who refused to surrender their stories or their bodies to the hegemony of tech."—E. Patrick Johnson, author of Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History
“In her book about the ‘erotic resisters’ of San Francisco, Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa sheds light on the women artists, activists, and strippers who made history—from their heyday in the smut capital of the United States to the end of the 20th century when they fought for their rights as laborers. She writes courageously and eloquently from her perspective as a performance artist and scholar inspired by the tradition of sex-positive feminists since the 1960s who have resisted patriarchy by reclaiming and celebrating their sexuality.”—Annie Sprinkle, Former Stripper, Performance Artist, Ecosex Educator and Beth Stephens, Performance Artist, Art Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Environmental Activist
256 pp.6 x 9Illus: 45 b/w illustrations
9780520398948$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Feb 2024