Whorephobia

Few people are looked at as closely as strippers. They are desired, studied, and sorted into types: angels, Jezebels, or hookers with hearts of gold. This anthology gathers twenty-three dancers, working across different decades, cities, and identities, to describe those years in their own words.

The essays and interviews run from a dancer's first shift to the day she retires, or the day she decides she never will. Along the way the writers cover friendship, motherhood, teaching, the daily grind of work, making art, and activism. Their accounts hold camaraderie and celebration alongside pride, joy, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear, both on the stage and away from it.

The pieces answer the stock images of strippers found in crime films, television shows, music videos, newspaper stories, and legislative debates. Each contributor sets aside lurid guesswork and worn-out stereotypes to argue that sex work is labor and that dancers are ordinary people. Contributors include Cookie Mueller, Kathy Acker, Jo Weldon, Susan McMullan, Maggie Estep, Chris Kraus, Julie Lynch, Jill Morley, Susan Walsh, Debi Kelly-Van Cleave, Elissa Wald, Essence Revealed, Sassy Penny, Jacq The Stripper, Reese Piper, Lux Atl, Akynos, Antonia Crane, Lily Burana, A M Davies, and Selena.