Home
Revelations: Essays on Striptease and Sexuality (Nightwood $16.95)
IT TOOK FORMER STRIPPER AND FEMINIST Margaret Dragu of Steveston ten years to shed her inhibitions and contradictory feelings to co-write Revelations: Essays on Striptease and Sexuality (Nightwood $16.95) with Susan Harrison of Ace Space Gallery in Toronto.
"It was a huge journey," she says, "I changed my mind several times about what I thought about stripping." The final result is a passionate insiders' defence of a maligned art form and its practitioners.
With interviews, research, essays and personal anecdotes, Revelations examines the social context of the stripper and the persistence of striptease in the face of sexual taboos, bad working conditions and oppression by employers, organized crime and the law. "In a way, my book could just as easily be about dentists," says Dragu, "Any time you get detailed information about any profession that gives you insight into the society."
And who is going to read Dragu's Revelations? "Artists and intellectuals and feminists and anybody interested in sexuality and the differences between art and entertainment," she says then laughs, "And hopefully not too many of my relatives."
[Winter / BCBW 1989]
"It was a huge journey," she says, "I changed my mind several times about what I thought about stripping." The final result is a passionate insiders' defence of a maligned art form and its practitioners.
With interviews, research, essays and personal anecdotes, Revelations examines the social context of the stripper and the persistence of striptease in the face of sexual taboos, bad working conditions and oppression by employers, organized crime and the law. "In a way, my book could just as easily be about dentists," says Dragu, "Any time you get detailed information about any profession that gives you insight into the society."
And who is going to read Dragu's Revelations? "Artists and intellectuals and feminists and anybody interested in sexuality and the differences between art and entertainment," she says then laughs, "And hopefully not too many of my relatives."
[Winter / BCBW 1989]
Submitted on February 5, 2004 in By David.
