Maddie Burdon

Biography

Maddie is an artist & PhD candidate whose expanded practice engages autotheory, sex work, art, dress, adornment and queerness. Her work has been featured in the Lethaby Gallery, the Museum of Sex Objects, the British Museum, i-D, the Wellcome Collection, Saatchi's The Other Art Fair, Femzine and GROT by Jonny Kaye. Maddie is also a founding member of East London Strippers Collective CIC, where she works to bridge the gap between academia and sex work, one eight inch heeled step at a time. Her work as a performer has seen her nominated for a Sexual Freedom Award, regularly appearing at Torture Garden, Sex & Rage, The Box Soho and Glitterbox Ibiza.

Her PhD project, Queer Whores: Embodied Knowledge and Performance Practices in Sex Work, explores a practice-led approach to embodied productions of knowledge and performance at the intersection of queerness and sex work. The project emphasises the value and importance of lived experience in stigmatised fields, to produce ethically responsible and engaging research. Centred upon critical feminist thought by engaging autotheory as a methodology, the project draws upon diaries and documentation from shows in London’s queer performance scene as the primary materials for analysis. Performance practices central to the project include stripping, sploshing, pole dance, aerial, and fetish wrestling. The research project stems from an urgent need to address the increasingly harmful attitudes and legislation toward LGBTQ+ issues and sex workers alike by countering stigma and amplifying sex workers’ overlooked role in queer histories.


Queer Whores celebrates the importance of sex worker-authored scholarship and contributions to its place in the arts, while critiquing modes of cultural-gatekeeping. It asks how the experiences of marginalised groups can be expressed through artistic practice whilst exploring the relationship of class, taste, stigma and whorephobia to the racialisation and marginalisation of bodies, seeking to blend theory with lived experience and practice to produce a thesis that integrates audiovisual performance evidence to document and affirm this unique artistic-academic practice.