This month's conversation is with erotic performer and activist Chiqui Love.
Chiqui Love is a burlesque and striptease artist and storyteller with over 22 years of experience. A power femme and co-founding member of two strippers’ collectives—East London Strippers Collective and Berlin Strippers Collective—she works to de-stigmatize sex work and open a dialogue around more ethical ways of providing and consuming erotic entertainment. Her approach centers on empowering workers and welcoming every gender and body shape. She is a passionate advocate for fair working conditions and for putting women at the forefront of any conversation involving bodily autonomy, pleasure, and freedom.
Chiqui Love’s mission is to raise awareness—especially among women—encouraging them to enjoy their bodies unashamedly and embrace their inner bitch-ass goddess.
S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate.
We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.
You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/
Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.
