Caroline Blaike, a queer, American Sign Language performer, consultant, and interpreter. She is also a dancer at one of Los Angeles’ most iconic stripclubs, Jumbo’s Clown Room.
Although Blaike is hearing, her story shares a common thread with the community she signs with. Both the deaf community and exotic dancers are subject to outdated and perverse stigmas that overshadow the complexity and skill involved in their lives and work, depriving them not only of societal acceptance and fair representation, but of the basic autonomy to take up space.
Caroline is also a lesbian—a disruptive presence in an ecosystem that masquerades as the epicenter of the male gaze. Her performance plays to male desire, but never surrenders to it. She wears the mask they expect while keeping her truth untouched. In doing so, she flips the script: profiting from the gaze without being consumed by it. She inhabits the stage as a queer woman, asserting control in a space built to deny it—reshaping a world that too often smooths women down into a single, sellable image.
This photo series explores the potency of our bodies as vehicles for language, transforming movement into power that transcends sound, defying an ignorant world in a way that is audacious, unapologetically sexy, and unexpectedly LOUD.
Featured in sticks and stones editorial
