Marc L. Moskowitz rights about this practice, in his recent documentary Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan.

He explains that It’s not at all common for urbanites, but in rural settings, most people have seen these performances. Actual full stripping has gone underground because there were laws enacted against full nudity in the mid-Eighties, so that isn’t as popular as it once was. I didn’t see any full stripping — though it is likely that this was in part because they knew I was filming at that time — but almost everyone I spoke with had seen full stripping. Most people in Taiwan categorize both the strippers and the singers as one group — as Electric Flower Car performers — the only people I spoke with who made a clear delineation between strippers and singers were the performers and managers themselves.

Now its against the law

In general, what I witnessed was two stages of performance. One was in the equivalent of a miniskirt and a dress top that ranged from something you might see average people wearing on their way to a friend’s house to a bit more revealing. The second stage was inevitably bikinis. It’s absolutely true, though, some of the performers emphasized their singing ability whereas others gyrated in fairly risqué ways. The third stage, that of full nudity, is something that everyone I spoke with

had seen, but since that is now against the law the performers were careful not to do that when I was filming.

The two most surprising events both happened at celebrations for temple birthdays, not at funerals. On one occasion a performer walked into the audience to rub men’s crotches and on another occasion a performer went into the audience to give men a lap dance, sitting on their laps and pressing the men’s heads into her shaking breasts. I didn’t include either of these scenes in the film because there was no way of doing it without revealing the women’s identities and I didn’t want to get them in trouble with the law.