About

A practice-led research project, Queer Whores explores embodied productions of knowledge and performance at the intersection of queerness and sex work.

The project emphasises the value and importance of lived experience in stigmatised fields, to produce ethically responsible and engaging research. Centred upon critical feminist thought by engaging autotheory as a methodology, the project draws upon diaries and documentation from shows in London’s queer performance scene as the primary materials for analysis. Performance practices central to the project include stripping, sploshing, pole dance, aerial, and fetish wrestling.

This research project stems from an urgent need to address the increasingly harmful attitudes and legislation toward LGBTQ+ issues and sex workers alike by countering stigma and amplifying sex workers’ overlooked role in queer histories.

This project celebrates the importance of sex worker-authored scholarship and contributions to its place in the arts, while critiquing modes of cultural-gatekeeping too. Influenced by figures like Annie Sprinkle, Nina Arsenault, Michele Foucault and José Muńoz, it asks how the experiences of marginalised groups can be expressed through artistic practice whilst exploring the relationship of class, taste, stigma and whorephobia to the racialisation and marginalisation of bodies. Critically, the project is situated within the fields of sexuality, gender, labour and pleasure studies, drawing lines of thought with Wolff, McCartney and Maynard. It seeks to blend theory with lived experience and practice to produce a thesis that integrates audiovisual performance evidence to document and affirm this unique artistic-academic practice.