Erotic Resistance celebrates the erotic performance cultures that have shaped San Francisco. It preserves the memory of the city's bohemian past and its essential role in the development of American adult entertainment by highlighting the contributions of women of color, queer women, and trans women who were instrumental in the city's labor history, as well as its LGBT and sex workers' rights movements. In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in the city for the first time in the US, though cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. In the 1990s, stripper-artist-activists led the first successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize. Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa uses visual and performance analysis, historiography, and ethnographic research, including participant observation as both performer and spectator and interviews with legendary burlesquers and strippers, to share this remarkable story.

"Erotic Resistance is an act of memory preservation regarding San Francisco's foundational role in the erotic entertainment and sex industries of the United States. It highlights the contributions of women of color, queer women, and trans women who were instrumental at key moments in the city's history concerning labor as well as the LGBT and sex workers' rights movements. In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in San Francisco for the first time in US history, although cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. In yet another first instance in US history, San Francisco activist-strippers, who were also artists, led successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize in the strip club industry in the 1990s. Using diverse methods, including ethnography, visual and performance analysis, and historiography, Erotic Resistance relates these phenomena through archival materials, artworks, and original interviews with women who performed in San Francisco's burlesque scene and strip club industry during these time periods"--

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama – circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional.

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The author builds on previous scholars' work identifying the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What she adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity.