Abstract
In Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town, Susan Dewey explores the underrepresented population of working-class mothers within the sex industry. The women Dewey studied work at a club called Vixens, located in the working-class town of Sparksburgh in upstate New York, a town affected by deindustrialization and outsourcing, where the women view sex work as their most lucrative option and one that allows them to spend time with their families. Dewey employs ethnographic methods, interviewing and conducting participant observations with fifty women during her time at Vixens, but chooses five women (Star, Diamond, Cinnamon, Chantelle, and Angel) ranging from their early- to mid-20s to represent the overall themes of the other women.
All of the women struggle with working in a stigmatized profession that is positioned as incompatible with normative notions of motherhood, worker status, and family stability. Dewey’s interviews and ethnographic thick descriptions illustrate the intersections between public policy and constructions of feminized labor. For example, many of the women did not apply for public assistance or housing because of their marginal status as workers in an industry considered deviant and the requirements for qualifying for public assistance and housing (i.e., proof of income, number of dependent children, home visits to access eligibility, and information on biological fathers). Some women, such as Angel who has been arrested for drugs, or Cinnamon who has a prostitution arrest, feared that their criminal records prevented them from qualifying for these services. Instead of receiving help from the state, these women feared they would be subject to further punishment for not meeting family norms.
Dewey paints a complex picture of women trying to provide and reproduce norms of family and motherhood. For example, we see women overspending on their children’s birthday and discussions of women’s sacrifices, especially the emotional cost of working the night shift and not seeing their families as often as they would like. Dewey also shows the quest for heteronormativity among a few of the dancers in their dating relationships with men, and how the women negotiate the stigma of their job with their desire for a “normal” family life, including, for Diamond, balancing the professional and romantic boundaries between being a dancer and dating a male bouncer at Vixens. We also see dancers negotiate aspects of risk taking in their jobs in relation to customer dating, drug use, and prostitution. Some dancers’ behaviors are connected to the goal of trying to get out of the sex industry via dating men, sometimes with the hopes of marriage.
Dewey’s analysis of sex work as a “deviant” form of body work compared with other intimate forms of body labor, such as ova donation, is the book’s strongest theoretical contribution to the field of women and work. Dewey explores the connection between illegitimate and unethical forms of body work in the form of selling sexual services and fantasies and donating one’s ova. Because egg donors hope to make money if fertility treatments are successful, they are selling something society views as private and something many believe should not be for sale, similar to sex. Women who donate their ova experience health risks and psychological effects, but do not experience the same stigma as women who strip.
While I enjoyed Dewey’s class analysis of the women who work at Vixens and the working-class descriptions of Sparksburgh, I was curious if race and ethnicity were also salient factors in her respondents’ experiences. For example, Dewey references Blackness when she explains that the kinds of exotic dances performed in strip clubs often have a base in African dance. Similarly, when Diamond donates her eggs, Dewey references her whiteness as a benefit that marks her as a desirable candidate. I wished Dewey had given the category of race more importance in her analysis of dancers’ class positioning in and outside of Vixens. Were there women of color at Vixens? If so, how does whiteness function for white working-class dancers? Would race be a factor in how they experience being exotic dancers as working-class women? How would competition with women of color affect their marketability and desirability among customers?
Neon Wasteland will be useful within the fields of women’s studies, sociology, and anthropology. Anyone interested in studies of women in the sex industry that expand beyond the dualism of good and bad women and deviant professions will benefit from this book.