ABSTRACT
Strip clubs catering specifically to heterosexual men are a popular form of entertainment in the USA. The clubs range from neighbourhood bars to high-end entertainment complexes known as gentleman’s clubs, and may offer an array of services – stage dancing, table dancing or lap dancing, extended conversation opportunities with dancers, food and beverages and televised sports events. Upper-tier gentleman’s clubs may provide conference or VIP rooms to draw a business crowd; many of these clubs are marketed to middle class customers as ‘classy’ venues featuring refined entertainers, differentiated from the clubs one would find in a red-light district. It makes sense that strip clubs should multiply in the USA during the last several decades, alongside the panic about HIV/AIDS and fears about the dissolution of the family. The process of upscaling in strip clubs, with a promise of ‘clean’ and respectable interactions, alleviates fears about contamination and disease that escalated around prostitution. There are numerous other social changes that may be influencing this rapid increase in strip clubs in the USA as well: the increased presence of women in the workforce, a continued backlash against feminism and the idea of ‘political correctness’, ongoing and concerted marketing efforts to sexualise and masculinise particular forms of consumption (‘sports, beer and women’, for example), changing patterns of mobility that have influenced dating practices and the formation of intimate partnerships, renewed commitments to monogamy for certain groups of married men, and changes in the nature of work that involve more out-of-town travel for business and thus more anonymous opportunities to purchase commodified sexualised services, to name just a few. I began researching strip clubs in 1995 and worked as an exotic dancer off and on for six years during this time. In the period 1997-8 I conducted fieldwork in five strip clubs in a fairly large southeastern city that I call Laurelton by seeking employment as a nude entertainer. As strip clubs are highly stratified in terms of ‘classiness’, I selected sites ranging from the most prestigious clubs in the city (offering valet parking, luxurious atmospheres, expensive lighting and sound systems, dozens of dancers on multiple stages, etc.) to lower tier ‘dive’ bars (dimly lit, sparsely furnished and located in red-light districts or simply known as smaller neighbourhood venues). Although the degree of nudity varies in strip clubs around the country, Laurelton laws allowed the dancers to strip completely. Dancers were required to perform onstage for tips; they were also, however, expected to circulate among the customers to sell ‘private’ table dances. Depending on the rules and layout of the club, the dancer might disrobe on a customer’s table so that he could view her from
below, on the floor between his legs while he was seated or in front of his chair on a slightly raised platform. A club might have between one and four stages with dancers on each, and any number of nude women might be performing among the audience at any given time. In addition to my fieldwork, over the past decade I have continued to observe in strip clubs around the country and to interview both customers and dancers. A focus on bodily exposure distinguishes strip clubs from other types of bars and nightclubs (although this boundary may be eroding somewhat with some of the increasingly risqué fashions for women) and the focus on sexualised looking in a public atmosphere differentiates strip clubs from many other forms of adult entertainment such as pornography, prostitution or oral or manual release in a massage parlour. Yet, the desire to visit strip clubs is more than just a desire to passively observe women’s bodies, even for the most voyeuristic of customers. There are many ways to potentially ‘see’ naked women – peeping, viewing pornography, reading medical texts or developing intimate relationships with them, for example. These visits, then, must also be seen as a desire to have a particular kind of experience rooted in the complex network of relationships between ‘home’, ‘work’ and ‘away’, an experience that I have elsewhere analysed as ‘touristic’ (Frank 2002a). Although a strip club may be a space of touristic leisure for the male customers, it is, first and foremost, a workplace for the dancers. Granted, stripping may be a means of rebellion for young women in addition to being a lucrative job, especially for those in the middle classes (Frank 2002b; Johnson 1999). However, the fact remains that the parties to the transactions are coming to the encounters with different purposes. These different purposes and meanings are not rooted in essential gender differences; rather, they are informed by labour relations as well as social positionings (including, but not limited to gender). Certainly the categories of worker and leisure seeker are not absolute: customers may conduct business activities at strip clubs, for example, and most customers are also workers in other arenas. Likewise, there may be some dancers for whom stripping feels more like leisure than work, at least on certain days, and a large component of the job involves engaging in practices associated with leisure – drinking alcohol, dining, conversing, flirting, having fun (or at least appearing to) and, especially, being undressed. Yet in the immediacy of the encounter, the money nearly always flows in one direction – from the customer to the dancer (until the dancer is asked to pay the establishment a cut of her earnings). Further, even though a man may conduct forms of business on the premises, it is precisely because this space is inherently ‘not work’ that it has been chosen. Thus, while one or both of the participants to any transaction may be ‘playing’ at any given time, this play is firmly situated within a larger framework of cultural and economic relations. It is within this framework that the dancers’ bodily revelations and performances of identity become meaningful, and hence profitable, both for themselves and for the clubs. The relationship of nudity to forms of power and control has long been bolstered by the regulation of bodily exposure by state and local governments in the USA, as well as the ways that those regulations are proposed, implemented and debated in public forums. Although I do not have space here to detail the development of modern exotic dance out of other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque or cabaret shows, it is important to realise that the history of striptease is shaped by the history of regulation and the conflicts surrounding sexualised displays
and behaviours in US public culture. Distinctions made between art and obscenity, lewd or acceptable behaviour or moral or immoral forms or representations of sexuality can be seen as ongoing arguments that are carried out in legal forums, academic treatises, public culture and the media and living rooms around the country. Frequently what is indecent in one decade is commonplace in the next (think of the scandal over the bodily exposure of famous burlesque star Lydia Thompson in the late nineteenth century – she wore tights and made them visible to an audience) (Allen 1991), yet that does not mean that the transgressions of the day are perceived any less seriously by their participants or treated less harshly. Regulations against striptease have often been justified in the name of social control and public safety. Such public safety campaigns can also be seen as reflecting a social class bias, with working-class or lower tier forms of entertainment being penalised more harshly than those designated ‘art’ and enjoyed by relatively privileged audiences (Foley 2002; Hanna 1999b; etc.). Striptease is seen as dangerous and socially disruptive by conservative segments of the population and thousands of taxpayer and private dollars are spent in attempts to eradicate strip clubs in communities across the nation. Because of their lingering working class associations, and the persistent, often erroneous belief that they are indelibly linked to prostitution, crime and other ‘negative secondary effects’, strip clubs have already been subject to more severe regulations than other kinds of entertainment, and some municipalities have attempted to use restrictive regulations to close down adult businesses altogether: requiring extremely bright lighting, prohibiting tipping, requiring bikinis or cocktail dresses at all times, stipulating excessive distance rules to separate the entertainers and the customers, etc. (Hanna 1999a). In 2000, despite a lack of sound evidence that strip clubs cause negative secondary effects, the Supreme Court upheld legislation regulating exotic dance in the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, ruling that ‘nude public dancing itself is immoral’ (Foley 2002: 3). The intricacies of the many battles fought in locales across the country throughout the twentieth century would be impossible to detail here, as would the complexities of the justifications that continue to be given for regulating, harassing, shutting down or allowing venues that offer the display of sexualised female bodies to their patrons. Instead, it is important to realise that regulation and scandal does not just repress unruly ‘natural’ desires in the name of civilisation and order, but actually helps to create and shape those desires (Foucault 1978). Nudity has an assortment of sometimes conflicting meanings, including but not limited to: innocence, naturalness, authenticity, vulnerability, sexual power, truth, revelations of one’s inner self, humiliation, degradation, a lack of self-respect, immorality, sexual accessibility and a prelude to sexual activity. Public nudity is embedded in a host of additional symbolic and emotional meanings, again often ambivalent and frequently revolving around issues of power and control. The use of stripping an individual of his or her clothes as a form of military action, punitive measure or means of humiliation is widely understood as a means of exercising power. At the same time, people who willingly or purposefully shed their clothes in public are often criminalised or stigmatised and seen as dangerous (powerful?) or pathological – ‘trenchcoaters’, streakers, nudists, strippers. Prohibitions on nudity have long been seen as part of the repression of natural sexuality and the body by society, both in academic theories and in folk understandings; thus, nudity can appear as transgressive, even dangerous to the civilised order.
Patrons of strip clubs, being subjects to and of the same discourses as other individuals, also bring ideas about nudity as transgressive, dangerous and liberating to their visits to strip clubs and their encounters with dancers. The notion that strip clubs were somehow an expression of a transcultural, transhistorical ‘natural’ male sexuality that was repressed in everyday life was important to many of the customers. Similarly, the idea that strip clubs were places in which one was at risk for physical or moral contamination was also motivating and eroticised for the regular customers. Customers sometimes described themselves as ‘adventurers’, dancers as ‘brave’ and ‘wild’, and strip clubs themselves as places ‘outside of the law’ (Frank 2002a). In strip clubs, customers also bring their own sexual histories to the transactions, as well as their beliefs about gender, sexuality and consumption. Although few of the customers claimed to be religious, and overwhelmingly expressed support for the dancers’ right to disrobe and the ‘naturalness’ of such an act, their enthusiasm usually waned when they were asked how they would feel if it were a wife or daughter onstage. Many of the regular customers were married to women who had more conservative views about nudity and sexuality than they did. Some customers stated that they were never allowed to look at the bodies of their wives or partners, even during sex – in these cases, nudity might be fascinating, awe inspiring or even upsetting. Even for those men who did have access to private revelations of the female body, the fact that they were paying for live, public performances meant that there were additional emotional layers enwrapping their interpretations of their encounters – mixtures of shame, anxiety, excitement and desire. If it is true that ‘there is no apprehension of the body of the other without a corresponding (re)vision of one’s own’ (Phelan 1993: 171), some of the pleasure in these commodified encounters arises from complicated, and concurrent, fantasies of security (rooted in the ritualised performances of sexual difference that unfold in the clubs) and fantasies of rupture or transgression (rooted in the feelings of degradation, vulnerability and freedom that many of the customers felt would accompany their own public nudity) (see Frank 2002a). Perniola writes that in the figurative arts, ‘eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity’. That is, eroticism is ‘conditional on the possibility of movement – transit – from one state to the other’ (1989: 237). This is so in a strip club as well – although perhaps a few customers would still be titillated if the dancers took the stage already nude – but with an added, gendered transit as dancers also move between categories and potentialities, performing as ‘fantasy girls’ who may be simultaneously, or alternatively, virgins and whores (Egan 2003). Although costumes are variable, ranging from the dominatrix to the schoolgirl, two themes continue to reappear in dancers’ self-presentations and adornments: sexual availability/knowledge and innocence/untouchability. These themes emerge in a paradoxical relationship to each other – no dancer is actually sexually available within the confines of the club (or we are no longer talking about stripping) and no dancer is innocent in all social circles when her transgressions (disrobing in public and for money) become known. Terrence Turner discusses the Kayapo of the Amazon, who exhibit an elaborate code of bodily adornment despite the fact that they do not wear clothing (lip plugs, penis sheaths, beads, body painting, plucked eyebrows, head shaving, etc.) and writes: ‘[T] apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman’ (1980: 115).
