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Article Excerpt
The sex industry, which includes strip clubs, is controlled by and primarily intended for satisfying the sexual desires of heterosexual men. As the industry continues to commodify sex through print, live bodies, and Internet technology, however, the consumer population is also expanding (Egan, 2006). Gay and female-centered pornography, female-friendly sex shops, and male exotic dance clubs provide an opportunity for men and women of various sexual orientations to participate as consumers in the sex industry (Montemurro, 2001; Smith, 2002). Women with same-sex attractions who are interested in participating as consumers in male-oriented strip clubs pose a unique challenge for such establishments to meet the needs of their "new" and diversified customers (Clements, 2003; Yancey, 2003).
Most strip clubs that feature female exotic dancers allow both male and female patrons to enter, although the majority of customers are men (Thompson & Harred, 1992). Previous studies consequently have focused on male customers, although research has noted the presence of women in strip clubs by including a brief sentence in reference to a woman present in the audience during field research (e.g., Ronai & Cross, 1998). While several have researched female patrons in clubs with male dancers (Dressel & Petersen, 1982; Liepe-Levinson, 2002; Montemurro, Bloom, & Madell, 2003), a recent shift in the consumer base of strip clubs featuring female dancers has involved women attending in larger numbers. Contemporary researchers have yet to fully assess the experience of the female patron in male-oriented strip clubs. As more women frequent strip clubs, how do dancers and clubs integrate them into a sexualized space traditionally targeted to male customers? How do interactions within the strip club facilitate or inhibit the erotic experience for female patrons?
The majority of research on strip clubs has focused on the strippers themselves: how strippers manage stigma (Thompson & Harred, 1992), who strips and why (Skipper & McCaghy, 1970), and how strippers negotiate their interactions with clients and customers (Boles & Garbin, 1974; Enck & Preston, 1988; Forsyth & Deshotels, 1997). Research also has focused on the emotional labor involved in sex work, how exotic dancers construct their narratives, and what is entailed in the performance of eroticism (Barton, 2002; Bell & Sloan, 1998; Chapkis, 1997). Given that most studies involve male customers by default, our research attempts to align itself with a diversifying sex industry that has a growing female consumer base.
This study examines the negotiation of female customers in a space designed for male sexual subjectivity and consumption. Data were gathered through ethnographic methods at four strip clubs and in-depth interviews with eight exotic dancers. Drawing on Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical analysis to probe the interactional dimensions between dancers and customers, we find that dancers interact with female patrons through passing over and sidestaging rather than recognizing them as viable customer marks. We argue that only when a dancer tailors a lap dance to fit the needs of a female patron is the woman able to engage as an active customer in the strip club. We also consider how the strip club may foster an environment conducive to women exploring same-sex desires through eroticism and play.
Is It All About the Money? Generating Profit by Qualifying Viable Marks in Strip Clubs
Since strip clubs are profit-oriented businesses like restaurants and other retail establishments, the objective of both owners and dancers is to make money (Brewster, 2003; Erickson & Tewksbury, 2000; Pasko, 2002). Dancers make most of their profit from giving lap dances or VIP dances (Barton, 2002; Ronai & Ellis, 1989). The dancers must therefore continually interact with the customers in the club by walking around and attempting to solicit drinks and lap dances, usually scanning the floor of a club to find the best (i.e., most lucrative) customer to target. Pasko (2002) likens this exchange to a confidence game (Goffman, 1952; Schur, 1958), wherein the dancer "qualifies" the customer or "mark" by sizing up his appearance and personal characteristics. Once the dancer approaches her mark, she creates a false social relationship with her customer using calculated interactions and manipulations that eventually result in monetary gain (Pasko, 2002, p. 53). Such tools typically are gendered, meaning the dancer appeals to the customer's masculinity and attempts to fulfill his sexual desires (Frank, 2002).
Dancers rely on cues such as clothing, shoes (Massey & Hope, 2005; Murphy, 2003; Ronai & Ellis, 1989), age, and even race (Brewster, 2003) to identify their marks, which make certain customers more appealing (i.e., more profitable) prospects than others. Some studies focus on the ability or power dancers have to "choose" their mark based on these cues (see Massey & Hope, 2005), while others concentrate on the social relationship that develops after a mark has been chosen (Forsyth & Deshotels, 1997; Frank, 2002; Ronai & Ellis, 1989). Such research exemplifies how a customer, upon entrance into a strip club, is sized up and therefore negotiated accordingly in order to ensure the most profit.
Since the stripper's main objective is to make money, any customer with money who walks into a strip club is, theoretically, a potential mark. It is clear from previous studies that while the primary focus of the dancer is to maximize revenue, the way such profit is achieved through interactions between dancers and their potential customers is complex. Most research has focused on the dancers' perspective, noting motivation, narrative, and strategy in this process (Deshotels & Forsyth, 2006; Egan & Frank, 2005); however, none have explored gender as a cue in qualifying the mark. And while some (such as Frank, 2002) do underscore customer practices, we argue that research has yet to acknowledge how being a woman impacts the customer experience within the strip club.
Our study examines the strip club experience from the customer's perspective, offering a much-needed glimpse into the erotic experience through active participant observation as female customers. Dancers continually qualify marks through profitable cues with male customers. What happens when women enter the strip club and seek to engage as active customers? How do dancers negotiate female customers in qualifying the mark and performing the erotic exchange?
Performing the Erotic: A Dramaturgical Approach to Strip Club Interaction
Our research builds on the many strip club studies that use Goffman to analyze stripping and strip club interactions (e.g., Enck & Preston, 1988; Erickson & Tewksbury, 2000; Pasko, 2002). When a stripper interacts with a customer using the confidence game, dances on a stage, or gives a lap dance, she ultimately is performing an act. Goffman (1959) suggests that individuals continually perform during everyday interactions; what observers see is rarely a person's "true self" but rather a contrived set of behaviors and props used to complete the performance (1) through the "front stage" (pp. 22-24). The "back stage" rarely is seen by others; it is where the performer can relax, step out of character, and drop the act in an attempt to be more real (p. 112).
Since vital secrets of the "show" or performance are visible in the back stage, and performers behave out of character, the passages between back stage and front stage (where everyone can observe) must be kept closed to members of the audience. An individual may unintentionally expose elements of the back stage, however, during interaction with an audience member. This "break in character" demonstrates that our interactions are in fact performances that occasionally suffer from spontaneous and unexpected peeks into our back stage areas (Goffman, 1959).
Within the context of the strip club, dancers sometimes give the impression that they are revealing privacies, or the "back stage" to a customer in order to play the confidence game and increase profit. A customer often wants a dancer to "drop the act," which makes him feel special and desired (Frank, 2002; Ronai & Ellis, 1989, p. 278). Dancers are aware of this, and a dancer therefore will give off the impression that a customer is seeing her back stage, when in reality it is just part of her act (Frank, 2002). Dancers also maintain their "front" by creating an illusion of attractiveness and sexual appeal for customers in the club. Dancers use props such as make-up, clothing, costumes, and perfume to complete their character. Customers rarely if ever see the preparation of these props; they are denied access to the figurative and physical back stage of a dancer's performance through the layout of the club.
In the strip club, there is a clear separation of the categories "customer" and "dancer" through the stage, curtains, chairs, and restricted access to certain areas in the club, such as dressing rooms and bathrooms. This division, however, is gendered; for example, many clubs have a separate bathroom for male customers but share one bathroom between dancers and female patrons. As part of our broader research question on how women's presence is negotiated in the strip club, we consider the extent to which the spatial organization of the setting contributes to the overall interactions between customer and dancer. We assess what happens to the relationship between customer and dancer when customers, specifically women, have access "behind the scenes." We further question if such spatial integration contributes to dancers' perceptions of female customers and affects the possibility of women as sexual subjects.
The Study
Data were gathered through ethnographic research and in-depth interviews. We conducted more than 50 hours of participation observation at two fully nude and two topless exotic dance clubs in southern California over a 4-month period, attending each location during both midweek and weekend nights. We actively participated in tipping at the main stage, purchasing lap dances, and conversing with the dancers and other employees such as bouncers, DJs, and waitresses. Eight in-depth interviews were later conducted with local dancers obtained through snowball sampling to supplement our ethnographic data.
Our ethnographic research methods, while similar in certain ways to some previous researchers (see Wood, 2000), are actually quite different from most in that we actively participated in purchasing lap dances and stage tipping. For example, Adler and Adler (1987) and Erickson and Tewksbury (2000) adopt a "peripheral-member researcher" role, where they refrain from engaging in the setting's core activities in order to obtain observable data. Our data, however, are driven by our active participation as customers in the club's activities, which is an underrepresented perspective in previous literature on strippers and strip club interactions. Further, since we assess primarily how dancers react to women in the clubs, we rely on our own experiences as female customers as key components of our data collection and analysis.
Drawing on feminist methodologies, we acknowledge that our personal characteristics (such as gender, race, age, sexual orientation) may have had an impact on our data, and we concede that our "selves" are intimately a part of knowledge production. Therefore, we note that we are both relatively young women, White, and open to sexual variation. We did not reveal our researcher identity during our participant observation, however, because we believed it would affect the outcome of the data. We attempted to adopt the role of a typical female customer open or interested in participating in the usual strip club activities. We wore appropriate clothing, similar to the range of clothing worn by other female customers we observed in the clubs, sometimes dressing more casually while other times in nightclub attire. As we later discuss in our findings, physical characteristics such as clothing or hairstyle (which may, for example, connote sexual orientation) are not seen to be a factor in affecting our treatment by dancers, nor that of women in general in the club.
During each visit to the strip club, we paid an entrance fee and entered the establishment] We mostly sat together, although we did separate on occasion in order to give tips, obtain lap dances, and observe the interaction between customers and dancers. We each obtained at least one lap dance per visit to the field sites. On several occasions we were not approached at all by the dancers, and we resorted to requesting dances from available dancers in order to collect sufficient data. The loud music and dimly lit atmosphere made it difficult to hear conversations with others, and notes were not physically taken on the floor of the club since we did not wish to reveal our position as researchers. Therefore, we held an extensive debriefing session with each other immediately after each visit, talking through the entire evening's events in detail. We tape-recorded each of these debriefing sessions, recounting a chronology of our activities, thoughts, experiences, and other observations while in the field. Any interaction with dancers that was experienced by one author but not the other (such as during individual lap dances) was reported and included in the final set of field notes for each site. This method of data collection worked well because together we could recall the most details about the setting, the dancers, and any interactions we experienced and observed. These sessions later were transcribed and used to construct sets of field notes for the purposes of coding and analysis.
Since we entered the field with a general interest in the negotiation of women's presence in strip clubs, we used open coding to analyze our field notes with...
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