No one likes to be pigeonholed, but Kimberly Dark downright defies it. She won’t settle for one genre, and she considers herself a sociologist, performance artist, poet, writer and storyteller. She both cultivates and challenges gender stereotypes. She’s even a bit difficult to pin down on her sexual orientation.

“The quick answer is I’m a lesbian,” Dark said in a recent phone interview from her home in Hawaii. “The slightly longer answer is I’m a lesbian only if you see gender as a fixed concept – which I don’t. But for all intents and purposes, I go to bed with people with the same anatomy as me.”

Dark will bring her new one-woman show, Stripped and Teased: I Could Drink a Case of You … and other tales, to the new North Park Theatre for one performance on Sunday, Oct. 23. She calls the performance a cross-genre mix of monologue, poetry and stand-up comedy. The show has the structure of theater, she said, but the flexibility of poetry performance or storytelling – the narratives will shift based on audience interaction.

“I wanted to maintain what was so brilliant about performance poetry – the urgency and the direct connection with the audience,” she said. “But a lot of time performance poetry has a certain amount of anger or high-pitched emotion that you can’t sustain through a whole theater performance. So I wanted to maintain the urgency, emotionality and connection with the audience, but still allow people to laugh a lot and flow with the concepts.”

Stripped and Teased is based on her own personal narratives and those of others. Dark doesn’t write fiction, she said, because there’s no need to; the world is fascinating and funny enough. Yet the stories are told in the first person as a form of autoethnography – an analytical account about the self as part of a cultural group, often exploring how that can create conflict or feelings of alienation.

The stories about strippers, though, aren’t taken from her own experience. Dark, a sociologist by training, is interested in issues like social hierarchy, social markers of gender and gender diversity. She has a theory about strip clubs that goes something like this: From a sociological perspective, strip clubs function as a metaphor for the way we organize our lives, clearly delineating the line between genders and maintaining the gender hierarchy. In an increasingly complex social world, the strip bar keeps the genders separated into neat, uncomplicated compartments.

“One party is clothed, has money, has shoes you could run in if you needed to. The other is nude and hobbled,” Dark said. “There’s a difference here that’s keeping the social hierarchy in place.”

What gets really interesting, she said, is when you throw some lesbian patrons into the mix – a topic she addresses in the show.

Still, Dark said the stories she tells about strippers aren’t critical of the profession, but rather of the social context in which the profession exists. The strip club plays right into the inflexibility of gender identity that Dark finds so fascinating – and disheartening.

“Because gender is such a rigid concept in our culture, adherence to ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ causes others who don’t express that in traditional ways to be labeled as deviant,” said Dark. “That’s a big problem in my opinion. I would like to see as much diversity as possible, and have it be embraced, cultivated and celebrated. I feel like I’m a gender deviant, too – I’m just rather stealth.”

Dark said she is acutely aware of the way we live our lives partly in response to how we’re perceived by others. Her appearance is traditionally feminine – partly by choice, partly by genetics. She carries what she calls “the burden of tits and ass.”

“I have a body type that’s immediately read as feminine,” Dark said. “The genetic lottery comes up that way, but it does have a social meaning that we don’t get away from very easily. Then I go ahead and cultivate that, too.”

She has been described as flirtatious, seductive and tender. Her long hair and feminine style often lead others to assume she’s straight. And her subversive response has been to both propagate and challenge the image. She uses her femininity to gain access to venues and appeal to people that “wouldn’t necessarily listen to a big old dyke.” But once that audience gets into her show, they’re going to get a dose of gender politics, in a way that’s funny, sexy and entertaining.

Stripped and Teased continues her work in challenging concepts of gender roles that began in 1997 with her first full-length performance piece, The Butch-Femme Chronicles. That show explored the labels of butch and femme, and the stereotypes of pretty and ugly.

Dark said she’s been “writing forever.” But the former San Diegan started performing poetry about 10 years ago, while she was co-facilitating a writing workshop at The Center. The group began to host public readings, and soon Dark was performing poetry and winning slams – poetry competitions where audience members judge the poets on content and delivery.

“Kimberly has a unique voice,” said poet Michael Klam, co-host of the bimonthly San Diego Slam. “You’re not going to get anything but Kimberly at a Kimberly Dark performance. She doesn’t emulate other people’s style, she doesn’t mimic what you think poetry is. She’s got her own style, her own voice, her own approach.

“Her voice is literary and sensual,” Klam continued. “It’s both butch and femme. It’s unafraid. It’s assertive, and yet can be very tender. She’s very dramatic and is definitely a performance poet. You sort of get pulled into her words because of the way that she uses her voice.”

Dark, who still maintains strong ties to San Diego, will return in the spring for more performances and to teach coursework at Cal State San Marcos. Catch her this time around on Oct. 23 at 7:00 p.m. at the North Park Theatre, located at 2891 University Ave. Tickets are $20 and available through the San Diego Women’s Repertory Theater at (619) 282-3277. A limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets are also available.