Professor Werner’s New Book

Professor Maggie M. Werner Discusses Her New Book, Stripped: Reading the Erotic Body

By Ani Freedman ‘22 Editor-In-Chief

On the night of October 28th, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Maggie M. Werner stepped onstage at Bartlett Theater in Coxe Hall in front of a room filled with her students and colleagues, wearing Halloween masks and eager to hear her read from her recently published book. In the midst of the pandemic, Werner’s book Stripped: Reading the Erotic Body was published by Penn State University Press. The Herald sat down with Professor Werner to discuss her experience writing and sharing this accomplishment.

“Stripped is a book that proposes different ways of analyzing bodily communication,” Werner told the Herald. More specifically, Werner clarified, the book breaks down different styles of looking at “embodied erotic rhetoric.”

As Werner explained the content of her book, she told the Herald more about the deeper meaning that the body takes on through this type of analysis. “So, instead of treating bodies the same way as we would treat text, […] these methods that I’m proposing try to take into account that bodies are not text, and there are multiple symbolic systems that they communicate in,” she stated.

Werner hopes to shift conversations about how embodied erotic rhetoric functions beyond “conversations that just want to talk about them as oppressive or empowering.”

8Werner perceives this as a limiting binary, especially in regard to feminist theory.

When prompted about her experience in writing the book, Werner disclosed that it was a long process, beginning back in 2005, revealing it to be an immersive time of her life in the communities where the erotic body could be observed. “It’s depended a lot

on ethnography, going and looking and being a participant/observer at these sites,” Werner continued, “Going to strip clubs, going to burlesque shows, being an audience member” were all critical aspects of her research for Stripped.

As the interview continued, the Herald asked Professor Werner what provoked her interest in this area of research. She answered, frankly, “Honestly, it all comes back to the fact that I’m interested in women’s sexuality.”

Werner then elaborated, “These are really important areas because of the ways that the conversations are so limited.” In researching and writing this book, Werner hoped to challenge and complicate the discussions around embodied erotic rhetoric. She claimed, “I don’t think anything operates as simply as, ‘it’s good or bad,’ and it wasn’t what I was seeing, it wasn’t what the sex workers that I met were concerned with.” As her research deepened, Werner found a greater motivation to change the way that sex workers and the body are analyzed and discussed. She realized that

“There was a disconnect between the lived experience of sex workers, including strippers, and what I saw represented by academics, news sources, and just people in conversation—and so I just wanted to intervene in that conversation.”

Sharing this accomplishment was no easy task for Werner, she admitted. “I was shaky,” she told the Herald, “I think that being a queer faculty member who deals with explicit sexuality is something that I worry about.” Despite these fears, Werner saw positive support and reception from the audience. “I think it was received well,” she stated simply, but the crowds of students and colleagues that flooded towards her at the end of the October 28th reading proved a great deal of enthusiasm to be the reality.

Given the specified, and what Werner perceives to be provocative material, the Herald shifted the conversation towards the potential larger impact of sparking conversations about the topics in Stripped. Werner hopes that this will create “a space for other people to be able to talk about the things [she] hadn’t been able to talk about,” referencing back to when she first came out. In doing so, Werner wants to create a sense of normalcy and safety about this discussion, as she told the Herald, “It is normal, and we are sexual bodies and people have sexual bodies.”

“It’s not dirty—but it is, and that’s why we like it,” Werner said. “We don’t want to normalize sexuality too much, because it takes the sexiness out of it.”

Nearing the end of the interview, Werner told the Herald she hopes that she will not only complicate this conversation, but also “encourage people to listen.” In the process of researching for Stripped, Werner revealed how she learned to listen to the workers she engaged with, emphasizing the importance of this act. “If somebody is saying, I’m doing this work, but I also wouldn’t be doing it if I wasn’t addicted to drugs and living in poverty, that you also listen to that and work with that,” she emphatically said. “That would then start making those important distinctions between people who are kidnapped and trafficked, and between people who

Photo Courtesy Office of Communications Professor Maggie M. Werner doing a reading of her new book Stripped: Reading the Erotic Body