“No Touchy-Touchy!” Management of Consent in Burlesque Go-Go Dancing

• In Event: 21081 - Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Gender

Abstract

Burlesque is a form of striptease that skirts the edges of nudity and obscenity and is largely performed as ticketed shows. The performers almost never show any sexual organs, and the audience does not have any physical access to the performers. Go-go dancing, in the burlesque space that I study, consists of a burlesque performer dancing for 12-15 minutes and collecting money from the audience who put it in between the straps of the dancer’s costume. The partial nudity and potential sexual nature of the burlesque shows and go-go dances mean that the audience sometimes may take liberties with the bodily autonomy of the dancers and try to touch them inappropriately. It is difficult to find literature on the management of consent in public spaces such as burlesque as the majority of the literature on consent in sexual contexts is situated “in the bedroom”. Even studies on strip clubs, where dancing, physical proximity, and money are similarly intertwined as in burlesque and go-go, rarely touch on the ways dancers deal with unwanted touching by the customers and are focused on lap dance settings where there is at least an illusion of privacy between the dancer and the customer. I will explore the public management of consent through the case study of burlesque and go-go dancing using ethnographic observations from The Wiggle Room in Montreal and interviews with burlesque and go-go performers. My preliminary findings show that consent management happens live, constantly and in front of everyone throughout the show, which turns into an ecosystem in which regulatory actions are repeated to bring the ecosystem to order when disrupted. I observed three types of interactions that make up the structure of consent management thus far in my field work: host-audience, performer-audience, and audience-audience.

Author

• Ezelbahar Metin, McGill University