The Feminist Strip Club

Welcome to the VIP Room. It is maybe a little bit different from VIP Rooms you might find at an adult entertainment club downtown. It’s a lot cheaper, first of all — only a $10 donation! You still meet with an erotic dancer one on one, but instead of a lap dance, be prepared for a conversation. 

At the Feminist Strip Club's VIP Room, each audience member — after getting checked by a bouncer — is given a menu of questions that the performer they are paired with has chosen in advance. You select a question as a starting off point for a 10-15 minute discussion, before heading “backstage,” where you’re walked through the process of how dancers get paid. “They are really getting that sort of behind the scenes information that if they are not in the industry they don’t have,” says Monica Sheets, the artist behind the project. “I don’t think most people know that dancers are independent contractors and are not actually being paid by the club.” 

The Feminist Strip Club launched in March, when Sheets began a series of workshops with a group of adult entertainers at the Weisman Art Museum, as part of the Museum's Target Studio for Creative Collaboration. They talked and dreamed about what ideal working conditions for strippers would look like, collaborated on creating a magazine based on those ideas, and hosted the first VIP Room event. The Feminist Strip Club will return to the Weisman in 2020, but in the meantime, Sheets is hosting a VIP Room experience at her studio in the basement of the Casket Arts Building this weekend during the Open Casket fall art festival.

Participants converse with entertainers during the first incarnation of the VIP Room at the Weisman Art Museum. Photos by Boris Oicherman.

Prior to Minneapolis passing its new adult entertainment ordinance that improves the working conditions for erotic dancers, The Feminist Strip Club published Issue One of The Grind: perspectives on stripping from the strippers themselves. The zine mixes persuasive and informative writing about policy issues around strip clubs, historical perspectives on how policy has changed, and photographs that illustrate the current and recent working conditions of the clubs. There’s a lengthy transcription from a conversation conducted with a group of entertainers about their dreams for what an ideal club would look like, complete with photographs of their drawings of those utopian strip clubs. There are sassy snap-backs to online reviewers, contact information for all of the Minneapolis City Council members, and a call to action, requesting folks to come out to a public hearing on a new city ordinance (which has since passed) that would improve the conditions of club workers. 

Sheets, an artist who uses art as a means for civic engagement, organized the collaboratively created zine with a group of current and former adult entertainers. The issue was put up for sale at local independent bookstores and galleries and at the Weisman, and distributed free at Minneapolis clubs. Some of the content also ran on Workday Minnesota’s website. 

Sheets was a stripper herself as a teenager. “It is something I’ve been interested in for a long time,” she says. “It was a pretty pivotal experience for me in a lot of ways, particularly the responses I got from people when I would tell them that I had been a dancer when I went away to college— that’s kind of what first sparked my interest in doing something around this topic.” 

Sheets hasn’t performed since she was around 22, but she’s followed the industry over the years. Recently she noticed there’s been a growing interest in labor issues generally, especially around sex work. An opportunity came up to work on a project through the Weisman, which meant she could compensate participant dancers in her project. “It was an opportune time to do something that I had been thinking about for a long time,” she says. 

The first issue of The Grind, a zine published by The Feminist Strip Club. Image courtesy of Monica Sheets.

Sheets takes a participatory approach to her practice. In this case, she worked with five to eight dancers (more or less at different stages), and set up a framework where the dancers were driving much of the content and focus. “It's not like I’m saying, 'We’re going to do this thing, and it’s going to look like this at the end,’” Sheets says. “I’m saying, ‘Who wants to get together and talk about these issues and have a talk with a labor law professor, talk with someone that does policy work on labor issues, and then we will figure out how we will come back to the public with this work that we’ve done internally.’”

Because Issue One of The Grind focused particularly on the new Minneapolis ordinance, the group decided they wanted to reach entertainers that work at the various clubs. That was a task easier said than done. 

“We went to each of the clubs and tried to get into the dressing rooms, which has various levels of complication to it,” Sheets says. “It makes sense that they don’t just let people back into the dressing rooms.” The content of the magazine also wasn’t exactly something they thought many club owners would support, so the group found ways to distribute the magazines without the owners and managers knowing what was inside. 

While the Feminist Strip Club doesn’t have a formal partnership with Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), a group that was instrumental in advocating for the new Minneapolis ordinance, Sheets says she met with the group towards the beginning of her project, to make sure she wasn’t replicating work that was already being done. 

“SWOP is a political policy based organization working on policy change, and certainly at the Feminist Strip Club, we are interested in that as well, but we are also interested in creating space for imagining alternatives and more big picture thinking,” she says. 

Future issues of The Grind may take on other topics related to adult entertainment work, and Sheets envisions archiving the whole project down the road.

In addition to the VIP Room performance — which takes place Friday night in Sheets's lower level studio — The Feminist Strip Club will also host a bake sale on Saturday afternoon, where visitors compete in a water and spoon race while wearing 6-inch heels. The winner gets their choice of baked goods. 

Photo by Boris Oicherman.

The VIP Room performance: Friday, Nov 1st, from 6:30-9:30pm; Cakewalk & Bake Sale: Saturday, Nov 2nd, 1:30-3:30pm. Casket Arts, 681 17th Ave NE, Lower Level Studio 4 (downstairs, past the elevator).

 For more info on Monica Sheets, visit the artist's website.