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Staging sexuality: Encoding, embedding and enacting lap dancing work

conference contribution
posted on 2023-09-01, 14:12 authored by Sophie Hales, Kathleen Riach, Melissa Tyler
While the study of emotional and aesthetic labour in interactive service work is well established, less attention has been paid to the context in which these modes of labour are experienced and made sense of. With that in mind, this paper focuses on emotional and aesthetic labour in the lap dancing industry considering how work in this particular sector and setting is staged. The study draws from three modes of data collection, website analysis, observations and interviews, which were selected to focus, respectively, on understanding how a bodily-prescriptive heteronormativity is encoded, embedded and enacted within and through the socio-materiality of the industry. Specifically, the paper focuses on how this heteronormativity is encoded through the industry’s online presence, how it is embedded in the situated context of the clubs themselves, and finally, how this is reflected in, understood and enacted, by women working in the lap dancing industry. The discussion focuses on how the industry is staged both materially and metaphorically, and on how various socio-material entwinements serve to condition and compel particular expectations and behaviours. The theme of touch also emerges as a point of crisis in an industry underpinned by a promise of ‘something more’, a promise that practices of encoding, embedding and enacting heteronormativity serve to perpetuate.

History

Conference proceeding

The 10th International Critical Management Studies (CMS) Conference – CMS 2017

Name of event

The 10th International Critical Management Studies (CMS) Conference – CMS 2017

Location

Liverpool, UK

Event start date

2017-07-03

Event finish date

2017-07-05

File version

  • Submitted version

Language

  • eng

Legacy posted date

2017-12-13

Legacy Faculty/School/Department

ARCHIVED Lord Ashcroft International Business School (until September 2018)

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