Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender

Australian dramatist Tom Holloway’s adaptations of ancient tragedy reflect both the way that dramatists can structure scripts with an ‘open dramaturgy’ that provides directors with the opportunity to realize text through postdramatic strategies, and the way that the classics can be used to investigate the Australian psyche. The 2010 première production of Love Me Tender, Holloway’s Iphigenia at Aulis reinvention, situated the tragedy in an Australian bushfire season, and reinvented it in the form of unattributed lines on a page. The absence of characters is a postdramatic strategy, and in performance numerous other postdramatic techniques were added to the script to create an affective, image-driven investigation into the theme of sacrifice. Chapter 3 argues that Love Me Tender embodies a politics of form, and that the play compounds an investigation into the idea of sacrifice with a focus upon societal tensions surrounding pre-teen sexuality and raunch culture. It suggests that Love Me Tender provides a key example not only of the way that this new dramaturgical style can be realized through postdramatic performance, but also of the political use of the classics in postdramatic theatre.

Andro-privilege, raunch culture, and stripping

This study notes a rising number of female customers at heterosexual strip bars and explores the reasons for this change. Drawing methodologically on audio-taped interviews with strip club employees and 150 hours of observation in strip bars, we explore the dynamics of raunch culture—a hypersexualized climate—and andro-privilege, a new concept in feminist theory that we originate here. Patriarchal cultures condition members to preference practices associated with hegemonic masculinity, and uphold masculinism, the ideology that justifies male domination. Andro-privilege is a new Western cultural practice that cloaks masculinism in a discursive mantle of gender progress. That andro-privilege exists at all is a sign of growth. It demonstrates that progressive ideas about gender equality have affected people, and created, at least among some, a misalignment with unfairness. Andro-privilege resolves this discomfort by temporarily allowing some girls and women to be “one of the guys” while allowing no parallel for boys and men to benefit from being “one of the girls.” We argue that andro-privilege thrives in raunch culture because it permits a woman or girl to resist objectification and position herself as a subject—a lad or bro—rather than a sex doll.

Spinning the pole: A discursive analysis of the websites of recreational pole dancing studios

Pole dancing is an activity that came to prominence in strip clubs. Despite its widespread reinvention as a fitness activity for women, pole dancing is still strongly associated with, and indeed trades on, its exotic, erotic and sexual connotations. In this article, we examine how the pole dancing industry portrays itself to potential participants via a discursive analysis of the websites of 15 major pole dancing studios in Australia. In particular, we examine some of the ways in which pole dancing trades on its erotic associations and capitalizes on the emerging postfeminist sensibility in western countries and its advocacy of empowerment through sexual agency, while at the same time promoting an alternative, ironic construction in which pole dancing is simply something a bit different – a novel way to get an upper body workout while having ‘a bit of a laugh’. We argue that the tensions between authenticity and parody uncovered by our analyses reflect a tension that infuses ‘raunch culture’ more widely, and discuss the insecurity and contingency of the ‘empowerment’ offered in these practices.