Feminist Methods in Social Research.

Students of the intersection between monetary transfers and intimate social relations face a choice among three ways of analyzing that relationship: as hostile worlds whose contact contaminates one or the other; as nothing but market transactions, cultural constructions, or coercion; or as differentiated ties, each marked by a distinctive set of monetary transfers. A review of payment practices, legal disputes, and recent legal theory illustrates the weakness of the first two views and the desirability of further pursuing the third alternative.

The Purchase of Intimacy

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George E. Marcus; Michael M. J. Fischer

The study of inequality has been largely defined as the study of its measurable extent, degree, and consequences. It is no less important, however, to understand the interactive processes through which inequalities are created and reproduced in concrete settings. The qualitative research that bears on understanding these processes has not yet been consolidated, and thus its theoretical value remains unrealized. In this article we inductively derive from the literature a sensitizing theory of the generic processes through which inequality is reproduced. The major processes that we identify are othering, subordinate adaptation, boundary maintenance, and emotion management. We argue that conceiving the reproduction of inequality in terms of these generic processes can resolve theoretical problems concerning the connection between local action and extralocal inequalities, and concerning the nature of inequality itself.

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Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis

Feminist, critical, and postmodern scholars have long recognized sexuality as a site of power relations. The recently released Report of the APA (American Psychological Association) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls is a welcome addition to ongoing feminist and activist conversations on how to intervene on issues of sexuality in the name of girls' and women's health. This article offers a critical interdisciplinary analysis of this influential APA report, expanding on and challenging several of its main claims. This article critiques the report as over-determining the negative impact of sexualization; offers other literatures as critical additions including feminist literature on media, consumer culture, gender, and the body, and earlier “pro-desire” feminist psychology scholarship; and critiques the task force's conflations of objectification and sexualization. The article concludes with a call for broadening feminist scholarship and activism across disciplinary boundaries to emphasize girls' and ...

“Bad Girls Rule”: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Commentary on the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls

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.

G-Strings and Sympathy : Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire

Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities. Simon Winlow. Oxford: Berg, 2001. ix+ 192 pp., bibliography, index.

Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities

This article explores customers' understandings of their visits to heterosexual strip clubs and the ways in which those visits become meaningful to them in relation to cultural discourses around ma...

“Just trying to relax”: Masculinity, masculinizing practices, and strip club regulars

This paper problematizes the concept of `true' intimacy by examining a particular commodified relationship - that between a female dancer and her regular male customers in a heterosexual strip club in the US. Participant observation is used to describe and examine the relationships developed between dancers and their `regular customers' and the mutual manufacture of identities and intimacy which is involved in these relationships. First, it is argued that an illusion of intimacy is produced within the strip club to make an interaction between a dancer and her regular seem more `real' and desirable. Next, it is shown how even such a commodified relationship can generate a high degree of emotional involvement, using the concept of `emotional labor' (Hochschild, 1983) to help break down the barriers between real and manufactured intimacy. Finally, there is a discussion on how an intimate experience draws upon private self-representations that are both real and imaginary, and upon sexual self-identities that ...

The Production of Identity and the Negotiation of Intimacy in a `Gentleman's Club'

This piece is a short story based on the author’s fieldwork in contemporary U.S. strip clubs. The story revolves around an ongoing relationship between an exotic dancer and a married customer—a relationship that only exists inside the club and that is based on the mutual construction of fantasy. It is followed by a brief discussion of the use of fiction in experimental ethnography and of the author’s own motivations for and experiences in writing short fiction.

Katherine Frank

Papers

G-Strings and Sympathy : Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire

Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities

“Just trying to relax”: Masculinity, masculinizing practices, and strip club regulars

The Production of Identity and the Negotiation of Intimacy in a `Gentleman's Club'

“The Management of Hunger”: Using Fiction in Writing Anthropology: