Can a Feminist Be a Stripper, Too?

What I Learned About Power, Shame, and Survival Before I Ever Stepped into a Classroom

By Carla Rodney

Can a feminist be a stripper?

It’s a question that surfaced — again — as I reread Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. A book written as a letter, offering guidance on how to raise a feminist daughter. I thought about my own daughter, about my journey as a mother, an academic, and yes — a former adult entertainer. And I thought: what if no one raised us to be feminists, but we became them anyway?

By some definitions, I shouldn’t qualify.

After all, I spent over a decade in burlesque and exotic entertainment. I’ve been publicly shamed and privately watched. I’ve been criminalized for earning too little and judged for being too visible. And I entered university under house arrest — literally. With an ankle monitor on my leg, a daughter to raise, and a past I couldn’t afford to share.

But if feminism is about the right to define yourself, to resist shame, and to reclaim power in a world determined to take it — then I was doing feminist work before I ever read a syllabus.

What Makes a Feminist?

This question isn’t just academic — it’s personal.

Because too often, feminist spaces police who qualifies. You must be respectable, educated, appropriately angry but never too loud. If your body is involved, it better be wrapped in trauma or sacrifice — not sensuality or pleasure. And God forbid you made money off it.

But what of Maya Angelou, whose early life included sex work, who wrote herself into liberation? What of Sojourner Truth, whose body was taken without consent, fetishized, and then erased from certain feminist lineages altogether?

What of the many women I stood beside in clubs — single mothers, immigrants, students — who were brilliant, resourceful, and feminist in ways the academy didn’t (and wouldn’t) recognize?

The Education Myth

I’ve heard it whispered, even within classrooms:

“This is what happens when you don’t have an education.”

As if stripping is a symptom of failure. As if poverty is personal.

And yet, many of us were already educated — in survival, in silence, in systems that crushed and consumed. I met doctors in dressing rooms. I met dropouts with more emotional intelligence than any administrator. And I met people, like myself, who carried books in our bags and bruises on our thighs.

What formal education often fails to admit is this:

There are classrooms everywhere.

Mine just happened to have velvet curtains and a cover charge.

Criminalized for Surviving

I was charged for not paying taxes on earnings that barely kept food on the table. The industry was exploitative. There were no benefits, no contracts, no safety nets. I never made enough to declare — but the government still came for me. I was threatened with jail time. The only reason I wasn’t imprisoned was because I was a single mother — and my daughter needed me.

So, I began university under surveillance.

An ankle monitor on my body.

A criminal record on my name.

A legacy of silence hanging over every class discussion.

I rarely shared any of this. I didn’t trust the university to hold it with care. I knew the judgment I’d receive — not just from students, but from professors who thought they were teaching “the oppressed” from a safe distance.

Reclaiming My Feminism

So again, I ask: Can a feminist be a stripper?

The better question is: Who gets to define feminism — and who gets left out of its narrative when we don’t ask hard questions?

I’ve been a feminist in platforms and stilettos.

I’ve been a feminist with a diaper bag in one hand and a degree in the other.

I’ve been a feminist behind locked doors, in front of judgmental eyes, and inside systems designed to break me.

And I am not alone.

Feminism is not purity.

It is not prestige.

It is not permission granted by the academy or the state.

It is the radical act of saying: I own myself.

I deserve safety.

I am not ashamed.

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is the story I rarely told.

But I tell it now — not for redemption, but for recognition.

Because there are others like me still dancing, still learning, still surviving systems that never intended to make room for us.

I was never meant to be here.

But here I am — writing, remembering, and reclaiming.

A feminist, yes.

A mother.

A former entertainer.

A scholar.

A survivor.

And none of these cancel the others out.