Abstract
In Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work, Kim Price-Glynn offers a rich, ethnographic case study of a highly gendered organization. Her site is The Lion’s Den, a run-down, all-nude strip club in the northeast that illuminates how organizational rules, practices, and characteristics reproduce and reinforce what Price-Glynn calls “gendered organizational jeopardy.” This “jeopardy” refers to the physical, emotional, and relational dangers and inequalities that women experience as a result of the gendered organization of their work.
Price-Glynn highlights numerous ways in which gendered organizational jeopardy is manifested in the club. The first substantive chapter demonstrates how strippers were stigmatized, excluded from positions of authority, and put in danger by club rules and practices. For example, the club had a rigid division of labor that resulted in men’s dominance and women’s subordination: Women did not hold any positions that gave them authority over other workers, such as bartenders, bouncers, managers, or deejays. Through degrading remarks about women, and strippers in particular, all workers were socialized to believe that strippers were not reliable, trustworthy, or valuable. Such beliefs not only reinforced a gendered hierarchy within the club, it also made strippers vulnerable to abuse from patrons and coworkers. One of the paradoxes about The Lion’s Den is that even as women outnumbered and out-earned their male coworkers, the club’s gender rules disempowered and degraded them on an organizational level.
The author also examines the role of club customers in maintaining gendered organizational jeopardy for the nude dancers. She argues that the types of masculinities that are normalized in the club are reproductions and extensions of broader patterns of gender relations. For example, she finds that many men visit strip clubs seeking affirmation of their own desirability and worthiness, which the women must demonstrate at the risk of their own livelihood. Similarly, those men who visit in groups can interact with women without fear of rejection, thus preserving their performance of masculinity. The club also provides a safe haven for men to perform violent, aggressive masculinity that would be unacceptable in other venues. Verbal aggression, derision, and physical abuse went unchallenged by strippers, bouncers, and management, thus contributing to the dangers that women faced as a result of the club’s gendered organization.
Because the club did not value strippers as individuals or as laborers, they faced a number of risks and dangerous working conditions. Such dangers were not idiosyncratic but, rather, were institutionalized and systemic. Strippers coped with these risks they faced in a variety of ways. Among other responses, some emphasized the positive aspects of the job, while others kept it a secret, or created rigid boundaries between their personal and work lives.
Price-Glynn concludes with a postscript that documents the changes that had occurred in the club several years after exiting the field and speculates as to how strip clubs might become safer environments for women. In that time, the owner sold The Lion’s Den to another local club. Even though the new owner incorporated a woman into a short-term management position, the club remained gendered, and in some respects, the situation for women workers worsened. Putting a woman (or two) in positions of power might not be enough to promote change, she argues, because change has to affect all club workers, and patrons as well. For example, clubs can and should enforce rules and promote positive norms regarding women. The larger task, Price-Glynn argues, is to transform the cultural construction of masculinity and patterns of men’s violence against women.
Throughout the book, Price-Glynn does an excellent job in highlighting the paradoxes and contradictions that exist within the strip club. For example, the club provides steady, lucrative employment for the club owner, but is characterized by high turnover and burnout for the workers. The club devalues strippers, but depends on their presence in order to extract money from customers. Among workers, strippers had the highest incomes, but the least amount of power.
Particularly refreshing is that the author very skillfully weaves in a broad range of sociological research throughout the manuscript, incorporating insights from organizational analyses, masculinity studies, sexuality, and even classical sociological theory. While there is plenty of thick, rich description in her work, Price-Glynn never forgets that she is analyzing her research site, not just describing it, and continually situates her data and findings within the broader sociological literature. Strip Club is thus not just about The Lion’s Den, or strip clubs in general, but has much to offer scholarship on gender and work and gendered organizations.