Taking it off, putting it on: women in the strip trade
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Kate O’Riordan doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400246
Taking it off, putting it on: women in the strip trade Chris Bruckert, Women’s Press, Toronto, Canada, 2002, ISBN: 0-88961-405-9, d16.50 (Pbk)
Bruckert’s book is a deep and subtle account of the reality of strip clubs in Ontario, which succeeds in the difficult task of remaining critical and self-critical within a debate – the one surrounding sex(ualised) work – which is characterised by harsh divisions. Her confident use of various different approaches – symbolic interactionism, neo-Marxism, discourse analysis – and her political positioning vis a` vis feminism are fresh and capable of politically engaged research and realistic, un-nostalgic politics. One only wishes that her writing was less didactic. Her work is grounded in the Ontario skin trade world. Her knowledge comes from her own work experience as a dancer at the end of the 1970s and a bartender in a club in the late 1990s, and from in-depth interviews with 15 women working as dancers. ‘Strippers tell us they are at work; this book is about that work’ (p. 16). A work, however, which is not like any other. Existing on the margins, stripping blurs the boundaries between private and public, presentation and identity, work, and leisure. The author appropriately compares it to other kinds of work performed by women, particularly by working-class women. At the same time, she shows how the specific sexual(ised) character of stripping makes it close to other stigmatised practices and identities (such as non-hetero sexualities). The author is able to place the Ontario skin trade in a larger social and economic context by simultaneously paying attention to labour and sex cultures. The strip clubs have been changed by the shift toward a model of ‘self-account’ work, a model that began in the 1980s in the market of direct personal services. The changes are de-skilling for workers and push them closer to prostitution in terms of both the sexual and emotional labour required and the social stigmatisation
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involved. And yet more ambivalent dynamics are also at work. In particular, the demand for workers has grown, access to stripping is easier, and, interestingly, there has been an erosion of the management’s ability to control labour. Under the present regime, employers do not pay dancers directly: dancers exchange labour and bar fees for access to customers with employers, and earn their money by soliciting the customers to purchase ‘champagne-room’ sessions (private dances in separate rooms). Part of the analysis that Bruckert develops on the strategies of resistance by strippers in Ontario may be valid for a larger population in times or places where the paradoxical situation of being a worker and an entrepreneur destabilises traditional class solidarity and alliances. These transformations are sometimes invisible not only to those who condemn sex(ualised) work altogether but also to those women involved in the strip industry in the 1970s who do not sympathise with the new
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