Naked
On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques
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- 9,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
In Naked, a celebrated burlesque performer, sex educator, and social worker bares it all, with incisive and hilarious essays about selling, performing, and consuming desire.
Fancy Feast draws back the curtain to reveal a world that most denizens of the daytime never see. Part exclusive backstage pass, part long-form literary striptease, these essays confront our culture’s tightly held beliefs—like so many clutched pearls—about sex, communication, power, and the messiness of life on the margins of respectability. In “Dildo Lady,” Fancy recounts her time compensating for the failures of the American sex education system while working retail at a sex toy store. In “Doing Yourself,” Fancy tackles fatphobia and dating, self-love, and fantasies. In “Yes/No/Maybe,” Fancy brings the reader from sex parties to polyamorous relationships as she contrasts the undeniable sexiness of enthusiastic consent with the devastating effects of miscommunication and entitlement.
Fancy Feast does this all as a fat woman who makes a living taking off her clothes—a triumphant punch-back at a culture that wants fat people to be self-hating or sexless. For fans of Lindy West and Melissa Febos, Naked is by turns splashy, vulnerable, and always powerful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burlesque performer Feast debuts with a frank and riotously entertaining memoir in essays. From a young age, Feast loved making costumes, and in high school, a production of Cabaret kick-started a lifelong love of performing risqué dance numbers. Into adulthood, Feast's parents remained supportive of her interests, with her mother attending her burlesque performances while her father politely stayed home, sometimes brainstorming business strategies and branding opportunities. Feast supplemented her dancing income with a $12-an-hour day job at a sex shop, where she hawked sex toys, fended off handsy customers, and answered intimate sex questions from patrons who'd received subpar information from their doctors. In addition to her professional exploits as an entertainer and de facto sex educator, Feast graphically recounts many of her own sexual encounters, which involve pushing all manner of boundaries and sexual mores, including but not limited to group sex, bondage, and notions that fat women should be ashamed of their bodies. The effect is never purely titillating: she uses her experiences in the bedroom and on the burlesque stage to illuminate the human need for acceptance, love, comfort, and community. Such softness suffuses the volume and helps it touch readers' hearts. This mind-expanding peek inside the erotic entertainment industry has more than its fair share of pleasures.
