Striptease

In Queensland live adult entertainment or striptease takes place in two different arenas that can be broadly defined as regulated and unregulated. This paper describes the regulatory framework controlling live adult entertainment in Queensland along with the key features and practices operating within the industry: namely, the types of entertainment provided and the characteristics of the female dancers who work within it.

Die Betrachtung von Kunstwerken unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Systemik erlaubt es in historische Perspektive, eine Art Entkleidungsprozess herauszukristallisieren. Im Laufe dieses Prozesses werden tradierte kunstspezifische Merkmale bzw. Kriteria schrittweise aufgegeben. Der Artikel setzt sich mit der Frage nach den Grenzen dieses Prozesses auseinander.

""The revival of burlesque striptease has important implications for contemporary feminism and
contemporary femininity especially in light of what Ariel Levy calls 'raunch culture' and the work by
other contemporary feminists on the sexualisation of contemporary culture; including this year's
keynote speaker Feona Attwood. Neo-burlesque can be read as both a product of and/or a resistance
to the 'pornification' of contemporary culture depending on how (and through whom) you look at it.

Neo-burlesque can be seen as an intervention into normative modes of sexuality or, through
another lens, as simply a reproduction of that mode of sexual expression. The interplay between
academic and participant perspectives, in this panel, will also help to highlight how the very act
of research is itself an intervention into a social practice or community and into the work of other
scholars.

We will present a range of readings on the topic to open debate around this and other contemporary
forms of sexualised performance. The papers would be somewhat coordinated and will speak back to
each other so as to highlight the complexity and importance of context for the staged performance of
femininity, gender and female sexuality. We hope that the conflict between our opinions, methods and
answers about this highly relevant topic will generate additional insight in and of itself about the topic
and about gender scholarship and gendered life.

Imogen Kelly
Imogen is an Australian made striptease identified performance artist and is notoriously known
as Australia’s Queen of Burlesque. She is also the World's Reigning Queen of Burlesque 2012
after taking out the title at the prestigious Burlesque Hall of Fame weekend in Las Vegas. She has
completed a BFA in performance (COFA NSW), a circus degree (ZACA,UK) and a degree in film
making (Sydney University, NSW) . She is also the first Australian Burlesque striptease artist to be
accepted, and graduate from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA). Her knowledge and lived
experience of the international burlesque revival and its Australian context are second to none. She
will speak as a performer and dedicated student of burlesque.

Lola Montgomery (Lola The Vamp)
Lola is the only burlesque performer in theatrical history to perform burlesque for the academic award
of the PhD. She is currently completing her thesis through Griffith University. She will talk us through
her lived experience of burlesque, performance of femme identity and the body as inscriptive surface
and historical notions of fetish and meaningful objects in burlesque performance. Based on this
research she will question the grounds upon which we build our understandings of objectification and
subjectivity.

Saphron Hastie
Saphron is a more traditional ethnographer (with all the good and the bad that that implies) and is
the only speaker on our panel who does not get up on the burlesque stage. She is a Masters by
Research student at The University of Melbourne and is conducting ethnographic research with
the neo-burlesque subculture in Melbourne. She focuses on the social aspects of neo-burlesque –
both the subcultural dynamics of the community and the way in which it is represented in a broader
mainstream context. For the panel she will discuss the ways in which burlesque performers represent
themselves online and in published interviews including the ‘stripper’ as a foil for burlesque and the
ways in which ideas about commodification and commercialisation shape perceptions of burlesque.""

Roland Barthes defines myth as a signifier of the second order, a type of social usage added to pure matter and adapted to a certain type of consumption. In Louis Malle’s 1965 film Viva Maria!, two mythologies productively intersect: the mythology of la Parisienne and the mythology of striptease. The film stars Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau – the two grandes demoiselles of French cinema of the day – as Maria and Maria, who accidentally found the art of striptease. The aura surrounding Bardot and Moreau, cultivated by their star personae, adds a further layer of significance and consecrates the mythological history of the origins of striptease. This paper will also consider Marc Allégret’s En Effeuillant la Marguerite (1956), Rouben Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme est une Femme (1961).