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The Dialectical Gaze
Exploring the Subject-Object Tension in the Performances of Women who Strip
Alexandra G. Murphy
DePaul University
Much of past research on female exotic dance has characterized strippers as deviant workers who are either passive, objectified victims of a sexploitation system that trades on their bodies for financial gain or as active subjects who work the exchange for their own benefit. Drawing on theories of power, performance, and communication, this work complicates the subject-object tension, showing how power circulates through a system of competing discursive relationships forming a dialectic of agency and constraint in which strippers are simultaneously subjects and objects. The author presents ethnographic data of how strippers discursively negotiate the ambivalence and contradictions they experience during their interactions with customers, management, and their families. Finally, this work concludes that given the need for all women to perform their prescribed gender in the course of their everyday lives, the occupation of the exotic dancer may not be as deviant as previously defined.
Key Words: exotic dance • ethnography • power • organization • communication • gender
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 3,
305-335 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241603032003003
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