Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Embodied Criticism of the Erotic Body

1. Deploying Delivery as Critical Method: Neo-Burlesque’s Embodied Rhetoric

2. “You’re Bound to Find Out She Don’t Love You”: Genre and the Erotic Body

3. The Pleasures of Process: Neo-burlesque’s Seductive Rhetoric

4. “I am a woman. This is my body”: Re-Articulating Identity in Sex-Work Activism

5. (Anti) Feminist Monsters: Alterity Rhetorics and the Signifying Body

Conclusion: Embodied Erotic Rhetoric’s Acceptance and Rejection

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Maggie M. Werner is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Reviews

“Werner articulates the utility of her argument of bodies being multicoded. “Embodied rhetorical scholarship that focuses on multicoded bodies and performances—like the performances explored in this book—has the potential to remake rhetorical scholarship from the outside in” (165). Ultimately, at its core, Stripped is a book on rhetorical methods for reading the body that can even be taken up beyond the context of the erotic.”—Sidney Turner Rhetoric Review

“By reading body language to investigate constructions of erotic corporeality, particularly in the public sphere, Werner enriches understandings of what the body can do.”—Heath Pennington Performance Research

“Stripped is an admirable, frank, and at times deliberately fraught read of eroticized performance with the body. Maggie M. Werner's analysis is accompanied by frequent personal, auto-ethnographic interludes. This multimethodological approach to writing is refreshing to read.”—Joshua Gunn, author of Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

“Maggie M. Werner’s Stripped manages to cover an embodied curriculum that is extremely relevant on and off North American campuses, where issues of bodily consent, control, agency, and expression should be central but have instead often been marginalized. The book is extremely well written, driven by personal vignettes and told through a series of public controversies. Werner successfully argues that embodied rhetoric is not just rhetoric about the body; it is also rhetoric from the body. Explicitly embodied rhetoric cannot exclude sexual behaviour.”—Jay Dolmage, author of Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability