Based on her experiences as a stripper in a city she calls
Laurelton--a southeastern city renowned for its strip
clubs--anthropologist Katherine Frank provides a fascinating
insider's account of the personal and cultural fantasies motivating
male heterosexual strip club "regulars." Given that all of the
clubs where she worked prohibited physical contact between the
exotic dancers and their customers, in "G-Strings and Sympathy"
Frank asks what--if not sex or even touching--the repeat customers
were purchasing from the clubs and from the dancers. She finds that
the clubs provide an intermediate space--not work, not home--where
men can enjoyably experience their bodies and selves through
conversation, fantasy, and ritualized voyeurism. At the same time,
she shows how the dynamics of male pleasure and privilege in strip
clubs are intertwined with ideas about what it means to be a man in
contemporary America.
Frank's ethnography draws on her work as an exotic dancer in
five clubs, as well as on her interviews with over thirty regular
customers--middle-class men in their late-twenties to mid-fifties.
Reflecting on the customers' dual desires for intimacy and
visibility, she explores their paradoxical longings for "authentic"
interactions with the dancers, the ways these aspirations are
expressed within the highly controlled and regulated strip clubs,
and how they relate to beliefs and fantasies about social class and
gender. She considers how regular visits to strip clubs are not
necessarily antithetical to marriage or long-term heterosexual
relationships, but are based on particular beliefs about marriage
and monogamy that make these clubs desirable venues. Looking at the
relative "classiness" of the clubs where she worked--ranging from
the city's most prestigious clubs to some of its dive bars--she
reveals how the clubs are differentiated by reputations, dress
codes, cover charges, locations, and clientele, and describes how
these distinctions become meaningful and erotic for the customers.
Interspersed throughout the book are three fictional interludes
that provide an intimate look at Frank's experiences as a
stripper--from the outfits to the gestures, conversations,
management, coworkers, and, of course, the customers.
Focusing on the experiences of the male clients, rather than
those of the female sex workers, "G-Strings and Sympathy" provides
a nuanced, lively, and tantalizing account of the stigmatized world
of strip clubs.
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