LIZZIE BORDEN is a writer, director, editor, and script consultant.
Her film Born in Flames, named one of "The 50 Most Important
Independent Films" by Filmmaker magazine, has been shown at
countless festivals and theaters domestically and internationally.
It has been taught and written about extensively since its 1983
premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2016 when it was restored
by Anthology Film Archives, New Yorker critic Richard Brody called
Born in Flames "a feminist masterpiece."
Borden also wrote, directed, and produced the controversial
independent fiction film Working Girls, which premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight, won a US Dramatic
Special Jury Recognition at the Sundance Film Festival, and was
restored by the Criterion Collection in 2021.
Anthology Film Archives recently restored Borden's long-unseen
first film, Regrouping, an experimental documentary about women's
groups. Film critic Melissa Anderson called it "combative,
entropic, mesmerizing." Regrouping, along with Born in Flames, will
also be acquired by the Criterion Collection. Borden is currently
in production on Rialto, a feature about women's freedom of choice
set in the early 1950s against the background of McCarthyism.
"Whorephobia is an immensly compelling anthology that gives an
honest and authentic look at stripping, and challenges many
commonly held beliefs about the women employed in these
professions."
—BUST
"Filmmaker Borden presents a diverse and authentic anthology of
autobiographical essays by strippers. Drawing on her experiences
making the 1986 feature film Working Girls, Borden begins with
stories focused on New York City strip clubs in the 1980s and ’90s,
where women made a precarious living by dancing on stage and
persuading customers to enter seedy VIP rooms. As the collection
progresses, however, Borden includes more recent and unusual
accounts, including Reese Piper’s musings on how her autism is
sometimes easier to navigate as a stripper than it is in regular
life; the Incredible, Edible Akynos’s reflections on the sex
industry and Blackness; and AM Davies’s stories of performing sex
work as an amputee. Each piece is paired with an
interview—conducted by Borden or another contributor—with the
author (or someone close to her if she has died), providing
intriguing details about each performer’s background and offering a
window into the supportive relationships among sex industry peers.
Most of the women featured are activists, writers, or artists, and
they excel at narrating their own stories and evoking the
atmosphere of the clubs and digital spaces where they’ve performed.
The result is a humane, multidimensional portrait of an industry
typically shrouded in artifice and shame."
—Publishers Weekly
"Through a medley of entrancing stories and
enlightening interviews, Whorephobia showcases the wit,
wisdom, experience and sheer artistry of strippers. What they
learned working for those folded dollar bills is all here as
priceless insights into sex, gender, class, money, power, art and
much more."
—McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
"Strippers share stories of romps and riots, hard times and hard
cash, shame and solidarity. This book is for everyone who wants to
understand the success and struggle of women—some who have not
survived—in the licit or quasi-legal sex industry.”
— Melissa Hope Ditmore, author of Unbroken Chains: The Hidden Role
of Human Trafficking in the American Economy and editor of the
Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work.
"A vivid, raucous, and disquieting set of stories told from the
point of view of [mostly] 'art girls' dancing in go-go and
topless clubs. Fleeing low-paying women’s work in service, retail,
and office sectors, the girls treat stripping as side hustle to
support their own writing, dancing, or photography while also
making it material for their art."
— Judith Walkowitz, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins
University, author of Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London
“Millions of words have been written about the sex trades, but
Whorephobia offers something much rarer and more valuable: a
collection of beautifully written first-person essays by women who
do the actual work. For readers who don’t know much about the sex
industries, these essays will shock and educate. But those in the
know will find the eloquent, funny, and powerful voices of these
women thrilling and profound.”
—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Madam: The
Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
“Delightful and memorable, Lizzie Borden’s wide-ranging collection
shows us what has changed about the stripper experience over fifty
years and what remains the same today. The intellectual and
creative power on display in these pages will leave you in
awe.”
—Gretchen Soderlund, author of Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the
Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917
“Lizzie Borden’s anthology takes aim at assumptions pervading a
vast, global and varied industry. Tracing the evolution of the ‘new
sex worker,’ Borden weaves a tapestry from early memoirs and recent
missives to create a portrait of the modern stripper. Borden’s
collection of iconoclastic, gutsy, and self-aware performers in our
North American sex industry is a crucial survey of the diverse
realities operating behind the screen of erotic labor. As an early
leader in whores’ rights, I welcome this contribution to the sex
worker canon.”
—Carol Leigh, author of Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of
Scarlot Harlot
“Lizzie Borden and her collaborators/contributors bring an
extraordinary ordinariness to the intimate economy. Here are the
tools, the training, the skill, the workplace conditions and pay,
the discipline and punishment, the quirks, and necessary illusions.
Forget straitjacket tropes of empowerment or victimization; here
are stories of working life, its magic and melancholy, pride and
repression, its pleasures and dangers. Here is a book about sex and
solidarity, the fraught alpha and omega of human existence.”
—JoAnn Wypijewski, author of What We Don’t Talk About: Sex and the
Mess of Life
Ask a Question About this Product More... |