Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

I want to write fragmented fictions that grapple with Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. I'm looking for fiction writers and readers, experimental critical writing people, and those interested in post modernism, post structuralism, Freud, and/or Marx.

I'm pretty serious about theory, and would like a group of people that are okay with being really confused in working through dense stuff. I like tough editors, and can be one too if that's what you decide you want/need.

My background is in literature(20th century avant guard), literary theory, bookmaking (including letterpress), and philosophy (here and there). If anyone is interested in hypertextual, digital, fiction, I have considered making part of my project writing/coding a short piece (maybe collaboratively).

The strip club is on South Tacoma Way, a 4-lane highway dotted with cheap motels, fast food joints, and auto lots. At 6pm Friday, the parking lot was nearly empty. The sign, which circles the whole roof, reads: “Déjà vu: We have a hundred beautiful girls and three ugly ones.”

We entered through a darkened hallway, at the end of which was a desk with a computer and woman behind it. From this vantage, the main space of the club is cut of from view. There is the sense of taking a little journey to a different, cloistered space: on that must be shrouded. From here, all you can see of the club are a series of backlit plastic posters which display up-and-coming Deja-Vu events. On each poster is a cluster of scantily dressed woman staring at the viewer in a teasing, flirtatious way.

The hostess asked if we’re there for job applications. She checked our IDs (the club is 18 and over) and we walked in.

The club is organized into areas of varying visibility and seclusion. Wrapping around the main spectator floor is a slightly raised balcony: near the entrance are curtained lap-dance booths, behind the main audience area are couches, big enough for two people of average girth to sit, bodies pressed at the sides. To the far side is the DJ/announcer booth, which is a box that is raised far above anything else.

The main floor circles the stage. There is a row of chairs that nearly touch the stage, and clusters of chairs and little tables behind. All of the chairs are on wheels. The stage, pulsating with strobe lights, is the only brightly lit location in the main club area. The audience area has regions of varying darkness, defined by red lights.

I entered with a number of preconceptions about this space and about this type of performance: this is a spacer of direct commodity exchange, where men, possessors of the gaze and sexual consumers, would look on at woman as object, who would dance the same old dance to gratify him and reap the ensuing economic benefit. I’ll get to how these ideas were revised by both the experience and theories we’ve been encountering, but its interesting to note how the people in the space interpreted us.