Crip slutaesthetics: Erotic object choreographies and temporal fractures in burlesque

Abstract

Direct, communicative and largely accessible, the choreographic tools of nightlife performance often elicit dramatic reactions from spectators, whether sexy, funny, surprising, glamorous or all of the above. This article follows pleasure, joy, erotics and pain across crip slutaesthetics into the choreographies of crip nightlife, based on interviews with four burlesque artists based in the United States with diverse experiences of sickness, neurodivergence, trauma and disability. I use movement analysis alongside attention to other artistic practices foundational to burlesque such as prop and costume creation to unravel the ways that performers Sweet Lorraine, Poison Ivory, Chaos X Machina and Jaqueline Boxx integrate their divergent bodymind experiences into compelling aesthetics and justice-oriented frames. I argue that crip slutaesthetics, that is the aesthetic qualities of crip sexual performance, can offer tools towards undoing ableism as it is entangled with racism, homophobia and transphobia that are often silenced by more formal concert dance worlds in the effort to deny embodied difference as well as pleasure from the proscenium stage.