Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture (Dress, Body, Culture)

Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture (Dress, Body, Culture)

Catherine M. Roach

Language: English

Pages: 224

ISBN: 1845201299

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


At the heart of Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture lies a very personal story, of author Catherine Roach's response to the decision of her life-long best friend to become an exotic dancer. Catherine and Marie grew up together in Canada and moved to the Usa to enroll in PhD programs at prestigious universities. For various reasons, Marie left her program and instead chose to work as a stripper. The author, at first troubled and yet fascinated by her friend's decision, follows Marie's journey into the world of stripping as an observer and analyst. She finds that this world raises complex questions about gender, sexuality, fantasy, feminism, and even spirituality. Moving from first hand interviews with dancers and others, the book broadens into a provocative and accessible examination of the current popularity of "striptease culture," with sex-saturated media imagery, thongs gone mainstream, and stripper aerobics at your local gym. Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture scrutinizes the naked truth of a lucrative industry whose norms are increasingly at the center of contemporary society.

A Pdf version of this book is available for free in open access via the Oapen Library platform, www.oapen.org

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must act self-confident in the face of rejection and never take it personally. They must perform desire and interest in men who may in fact repel them. They must be empathetic, good listeners. And they must not give in to anger when harassed by boors. Success entails managing all of these emotional dynamics in order to maximize income and to find satisfaction and success on the job. Failure to perform this emotional labor properly will shred a dancer’s self-confidence and leave her angry, bored,

potential of stripping in terms of these various levels of selfconfidence. Brandy works at the Lusty Lady. This club, with a branch in Seattle as well, is a well-known peepshow, nationally famous from several books and from the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite! as the first unionized strip club in America and now the first employee-owned locale.3 The dynamics there are quite different from those in a typical strip club. In a peepshow, there is no physical Where Fantasy Becomes Reality • 77

entertainment industry. Britney Spears, for example, whom one of my students dubs “the sex icon of my generation,” lolled across the cover of Rolling Stone offering cleavage to the viewer like a stripper in the middle of a floor-work routine.1 Janet Jackson infamously bared her breast – or had it bared for her – at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. Stripper-themed songs such as Sisqo’s 1999 debut single “The Thong Song” (“Baby, I know you wanna show that thong”) and T-Pain’s 2005 “I’m ’N Luv Wit

woman with the 18-inch waist. Indigo Blue, for example, talks about burlesque as a means of personal transformation that helps women to access their own power and to feel good about taking up space. As a founder of BurlyQ, a queer cabaret group, she also evokes the concept of the “cross-over gaze” and says that “our sexual power and eroticism can be for women too.” Michelle Baldwin, author of Burlesque As It Was, argues that “enough time has passed that we have choices now.” Curling your hair and

pregnant, sitting there garbed in my maternity dress as I interview Cosi, I agree with her wholeheartedly about the need for society to validate other paths for women. Although I try hard not to judge the life choices that my students make, few things depress me more than seeing my bright young women advisees blaze through college with realistic ambitions of grad school and great careers, only to earn their degrees and then promptly get married, work low-end jobs to support a husband, and

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