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Answer & Explanation:Theme: Whiteness & Race – articles cruz_janzen AND
hypersexuality (attached)
Compare what is
similar regarding Whiteness & Race (150 words);
Contrast what is
different Whiteness & Race (150 words);
Conclusion (100
words);
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Sex Res Soc Policy (2010) 7:70–80
DOI 10.1007/s13178-010-0010-5
Hypersexualization and the Dark Body: Race and Inequality
among Black and Latina Women in the Exotic
Dance Industry
Siobhan Brooks
Published online: 23 February 2010
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract During the 1980s in the USA, two sides of the
pornography debate emerged: (a) sex work is oppressive to
women based on sexism and women’s low economic
positioning and (b) sex work is empowering to female
sexuality and agency. However, a void remains in theoretical analyses of racial and sexual hierarchies within sex
industries that create challenges for women of color that go
beyond the pornography debates. Using a case study
analysis of three exotic dance clubs, the author examines
how hypersexualization structures stratification. The author
explores the hypersexualization of Black and Latina women
within the clubs regarding racial passing among dancers
of color, pay differences, and club safety to examine how
these factors produce inequalities between Black and Latina
women in the exotic dance industry. Avenues for further
social policy research focused on improving the sex industry
work environment for Black and Latina exotic dancers are
discussed.
Keywords Strip clubs . Stratification . Racism . Violence .
Pornography
During the feminists sex wars of the 1980s, two sides of
the pornography debate emerged as a result of feminist
movements within the USA (Chapkis 1997). The first
position concerning women within the sex industry taken
up by radical feminists was that all sex work, and to a
This article is from my forthcoming book, “Unequal Desires: Race
and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry” (SUNY Press).
S. Brooks (*)
Department of Gender Studies, Lawrence University,
711 East Boldt Way,
Appleton, WI 54911, USA
e-mail: siobhan.brooks@lawrence.edu
lesser degree, heterosexual sex, was inherently exploitative
toward women within a patriarchal society (Barry 1984;
Dines 1998; Dworkin 1991; MacKinnon 1989).
On the other side of the sex wars debate regarding sex
work, contemporary US feminists have focused on sexual
agency and the expansion of women’s control of their
bodies and sexuality (Chapkis 1997; Nagle 1997; Queen
1997; Rubin 1984). However, in recent times, feminist
theory has argued for a more complicated position on
women in the sex industry that is not just good or bad and
focuses on (national and international) sex worker’s rights,
with elements of both agency and oppressive circumstances
(Alexander and Delacoste 1987; Barton 2006; Bernstein
and Schaffner 2004; Bradley-Engen 2009; Chancer 1998;
Frank 2002; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Nagle 1997).
However, a void remains in a theoretical analysis of
racial and sexual hierarchies within sex industries and how
they affect dancers of color (Brooks 2001; Collins 1990;
Hunter 2002; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Miller-Young
In Press). No study to date has examined how race and
gender stratification are produced in the exotic dance
industry, and how this stratification influences material
and social exchanges between women in strip clubs. In this
article, I seek to answer the question of how racial
stratification is produced in strip clubs among Black and
Latina women by using a case study analysis of three exotic
dance clubs in Manhattan, Bronx, and Oakland. I will be
exploring how notions of hypersexuality functions within
the clubs with attention to racial passing among dancers of
color, pay differences, and club safety to examine how they
work to produce inequalities between Black and Latina
women in the exotic dance industry.
This article focuses the following research questions:
How are Black and Latina women stratified in the exotic
dance industry? What are the consequences of this stratification for dancers of color? How do dancers of color
Sex Res Soc Policy (2010) 7:70–80
manage racism? To answer these questions, I use ethnographic field research to examine how racial stratification
affects economic exchanges among Black and Latina
women in strip clubs. I argue that social constructs of
Black and Latina women as hypersexual makes them
receive less monetary value for their sexual services, thus
situating them in potentially violent work environments. I
expand on Patricia Hill Collins’ (2004) theory of controlling images and hypersexualization1 of Black bodies. I aim
to locate my study of racial stratification of US Black and
Latina exotic dancers within the discourse of the sex wars
and conclude with possible public policies to improve the
situation of Black and Latina exotic dancers.
Literature on Women in the Sex Industry
Debates about whether sex work is exploitative or empowering for women have been a focal point in feminist
discourse regarding women who work in the sex industry.
According to Wendy Chapkis (1997), the debates can be
categorized into three positions: (a) radical feminists, (b)
sex radical feminists, and (c) feminists who are arguing for
a more complicated position on women in the sex industry
that takes the debate beyond the feminist sex wars.
Radical feminists argue that within a patriarchal society,
women working in the sex industry are always exploited. In
this view, women cannot assert agency within sexual
economies; the belief is that women are victimized or
controlled by heterosexual male desire against their own
interest (Barry 1984; Dworkin 1991; MacKinnon 1989).
According to Catherine MacKinnon, pornography constitutes
[a] form of forced sex, a practice of sexual politics, an
institution of gender inequality. In this perspective,
pornography, with the rape and prostitution in which
it participates, institutionalizes the sexuality of male
supremacy, which fuses the erotization of dominance
and submission with the social construction of male
and female (p. 197).
On the other side of the debate are feminists who have
emphasized empowerment and have focused on sexual
agency and the empowerment of women within sexual
economies as an expansion of women’s control of their
bodies. They have argued that contrary to the view that sex
work is inconsistent with feminist ideals, women in the sex
1
Joane Nagel (2003) has used this term (after Patricia Hill Collins
1990) to describe an all-encompassing social position of sexuality
extending Judith Halberstam (1998) argument about masculinity being
a legitimate sphere of men. I use the term to describe the social
construction of people of color as possessing a more active sexuality
than Whites.
71
industry are taking control of their sexuality (Chapkis 1997;
Queen 1997; Rubin 1984). The third position attempts to
get beyond the sex wars and underscores sex workers’
rights nationally and internationally along with the reality
of both analyses of empowerment and oppression functioning simultaneously (Alexander and Delacoste 1987; Barton
2006; Frank 2002; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Nagle
1997).
Yet, these debates largely overlook structural racism
within the sex industry that makes it difficult for women of
color to maximize the benefit of the empowering aspects of
sex work sex radical feminists underscore and produces
problems not addressed by radical feminists, because sex
work in and of itself is often not viewed as a problem by
women of color but rather lack of decent shifts, safety, and
better monetary gain. Feminists who argue for a more
complicated view of women working in the sex industry
sometime fail to see how racism is a major constraint for
women of color choosing to do sex work; however, there
are some exceptions to this oversight.
Kamala Kempadoo’s (1999) Sun, Sex, and Gold:
Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean examined the
global conditions of the result of the outsourcing of jobs
and migration among female and male sex workers in the
Caribbean, and the racialized nature of sex work, emphasizing that the relationship of women and men engaging in
sex work is a product of colonialism with Westerners often
being the customers for sexual services. Kempadoo’s work
also has explored the racism inherit in which types of
women are viewed as sexually desirable, and how this
racism affects working conditions of women working as
prostitutions, with lighter-skinned women receiving the
desirable shifts and clientele. For example, in Global Sex
Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, edited by
Kempadoo and Doezema (1998), Kempadoo stated that in
the Caribbean, racialized hierarchies structure the conditions women work in when doing sex work: “Migrant
sex workers from Columbia and the Dominican Republic
are predominantly ‘light-skinned,’ mulatto (mixed AfricanEuropean) women, while ‘local’ prostitutes who invariably
work the streets and ill-paid sectors, are far more likely to
be of Afro-Caribbean descent” (p. 131).
On a local US level, Katherine Frank (2002) has
examined in her book, G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club
Regulars and Male Desire, racial hierarchies within the
geographic location of strip clubs in her research site of
Laurelton. Frank observed during her participant-observation
in her fieldwork in the South that strip clubs are classified in
terms of race regarding customer taste, geography, and club
reputation—highly ranked clubs were rarely described as
Black, whereas Black clubs were referred to as out of the
way or lower tier, and often women would perform illegal
acts to make money. According to Frank, Black dancers
72
Sex Res Soc Policy (2010) 7:70–80
working in upper-tier clubs were encouraged to identify not
as Black but instead as mixed-race: “In Diamond Dolls, the
Crystal Palace, and the Panther…the Black dancers were
more concerned with looking as Caucasian as possible to
make the customers ‘comfortable’” (p. 219).
My research contributes to these local and global findings
of systemic racism against Black women in the sex industry
and the sex wars debate by arguing that for many women of
color working in the sex industry, racism and constructions
of hypersexualization, not sex work itself, remain an
oppressive factor in their work environment. Similar to the
findings of Kempadoo (1999) and Frank (2002), I found
strip clubs to be categorized by geographic space associated
with race and class, and that Black and Latina women who
were light skinned received better treatment from customers
and club management. However, my work differs from that
of Kempadoo and Frank on two fronts: I studied sex workers
of color in the US context and explored racial stratification
among dancers of color, not among customers or White
women.
Theoretical Approaches
Patricia Hill Collins’ (1990, 2004) work on controlling
images of Black women is the departure point for my
theoretical approach to the structural positioning of Black
and Latina women working in the exotic dance industry. In
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment, Collins listed four types of
controlling images affecting Black women’s position within
US society: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother,
and the Jezebel. According to Collins, the images of the
mammy and the Jezebel originated in the institution of
slavery to justify Black women’s oppression within the
home and sexualized violence for the purposes of breeding
slaves; the images of the matriarch and the welfare mother
emerged during the post-World War II period to justify
economic exploitation of Black women on welfare and the
ideology that low-income Black women on welfare were the
cause of poverty among Black families. In Black Sexual
Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism,
Collins revisited these controlling images of Black people
and hypersexuality in contemporary forms of racist practices.
She argued:
The new racism also relies more heavily on mass
media to reproduce and disseminate the ideologies
need to justify racism. There are two themes here—
the substance of racial ideologies under the new
racism and the form in which ideologies are created,
circulated, and resisted. Ideas about Black sexuality
certainly appear in contemporary racial ideologies.
(2004, p. 34)
For Collins (1990, 2004), the intersection between the
new racism and Black sexuality is evident in constructions
of Black women on welfare and as possessing an aggressive sexuality, resulting in forced birth control and
welfare cuts for low-income Black women along with mass
incarceration among low-income Black men socially constructed as rapists and criminals. In this article, I would like
to extend Collins’s theory of hypersexuality and the
aforementioned stereotypes of Black women as sexually
aggressive and as welfare queens and applied it to Black
and Latina women working in the exotic dance industry and
economic marginalization. According to Collins (and also
antiporn activist Gail Dines), women of color are positioned
within pornography differently than White women, with
controlling images of them as hypersexualized resulting in
their being presented as animalistic vis-à-vis White women,
and thus more sexually available, which also has economic
consequences for women of color in the porn industry
(Dines 1998). Collins (1990) has argued that the subjection
of Black women’s bodies on the auction block during
the nineteenth century is the basis for White women’s
positioning in pornography underscored by the exhibition
of Sarah Bartmann. Hence, Black women are starting from
an animal status, not a human one, unlike the status of
White women at this time, who were portrayed as an ideal
archetype of womanhood.
This analysis is useful to my investigation into racial
stratification among women of color in the occupation of
exotic dancing, in which race complicates the experiences
of women of color exotic dancers who are not objectified in
the same manner as White women (i.e., it is not a guarantee
that a Black women will be hired at a high-end club just
because she takes her clothes off). In other words, women
are not objectified equally in the sex industry and do not
have access to work in anywhere they desire in this industry
but are instead stratified by race and class, much as they are
in other service-sector jobs (Chang 2000).
Method
I used ethnographic methods, fieldwork, and participantobservation for my study. I conducted a total of 12
interviews with Black and Latina women ranging from
ages 19 to 45 in New York City and Oakland, California.
My study passed institutional review board requirements,
and I used pseudonyms for dancer names and clubs to
protect the identity of the women in their professional and
personal lives. I interviewed six US Black (non-Latina)
women, two Black Latinas, and four non-Black Latinas—
all were dancers except for two (one waitress and one
manager). Many of the dancers I interviewed were students
at colleges within the City University of New York or
Sex Res Soc Policy (2010) 7:70–80
working in other service industry jobs. My sample is from
two clubs that cater to a male audience (New York) and one
that caters to a lesbian audience (Oakland). I chose two
gentlemen’s clubs (one Black/Latino/a, one mostly White)
and a Black lesbian club to get a range of experiences from
dancers regarding racial stratification and to explore
whether dancing for women was different than performing
for men. My sample size is small because these data were
taken from a larger project that did not solely focus on
the experiences of dancers, so my data is not meant to
generalize but rather add to a discourse on women of color
in the sex industry in the USA, a topic that begs for more
research.
My goal was to determine the connections between
dancer employment, desirability, monetary earnings, and
racial positioning of the women who worked at these
clubs. I met my interviewees and conducted participantobservation in two strip clubs in New York City, Conquest
in Manhattan and Temptations in the South Bronx,2 as well
as Girlielicious in Oakland, California. At all three clubs, I
entered as a customer, often alone, and paid for my own
drinks. Conquest charged a cover fee of $30; Temptations
was free before 7:00 p.m., after that, the cover fee was
$20. At Girlielicious in Oakland, the cover was $10 after
7:00 p.m. At all of the clubs, I interviewed dancers while
they sat at the bar waiting for their turn to perform their
stage show. I would often buy myself a drink and strike up
conservations with dancers asking them how long they
worked at the club, what they liked about it, if they feel
their race is an asset, if they felt safe, and how much money
they earned on a shift. I usually bought dancers drinks so
they could talk for longer and carried a notebook to write
down my fieldnotes. I was not allowed to record any
interviews at my sites (also, the music would have made it
hard to hear interviewees), so I went into the bathroom to
write my fieldnotes. Sometimes I shared with the women
that I used to work as an exotic dancer to gain their trust,
and I found that this trust helped the dancers open up to me.
My conversations with dancers lasted about 10 to 15 min,
with the exception of four women who felt comfortable
giving me their phone number for follow-up questions.
Temptations employed mostly Black and Latina dancers,
with few Asian or White dancers; it catered to a workingclass crowd, and the women tended to be creative with their
costumes and had voluptuous figures. Conquest hired
mainly White dancers, with few Black, Asian, or Latinas;
however, the waitresses, bartenders, and janitors were
racially diverse. This club catered largely to White businessmen, who considered Conquest high class compared with
Temptations, which customers classified as low class or
2
In this article, I use pseudonyms to protect the identity of clubs,
dancers, and interviewees.
73
ghetto. A Black lesbian in downtown Oakland named
Silky, who had a history of club promoting in the lesbian
community, started Girlielicious in 2003. Girlielicious is
described as being one of few queer clubs for Black women
and is known for lip-syncing events every Thursday among
performers and occasional violence among female customers
(usually couples) at the club.
Description of Settings
Temptations is located in the South Bronx in New York City
and surrounded by the following institutions: Hostos
Community College, a Medicare health rehabilitation service
center, the Triborough Bridge, a diner, a public auto auction,
a car wash, a muffler repair shop, and a Kentucky Fried
Chicken. There are no banks anywhere in sight but many
check cashing places. South of Temptations is the Mott
Haven neighborhood, with housing projects and local
business, though many buildings and businesses had been
abandoned and were boarded up. According to the 2005 US
Census, the median family income for the Bronx was
$33,460. The racial demographics of the Bronx are 23.6%
White, 32.1% Black, 0.4% American Indian, 3.2% Asian,
0.1% Native Hawaiian, and 52.3% Latino/a. Temptations
promotes fine wine, gourmet food, champagne, and beautiful
women for the customers.
In contrast, Conquest gentlemen’s club in Manhattan is
one of the most famous strip clubs in the country among
middle and upper class, mostly White men. Conquest is
located in Chelsea. Chelsea is located on the west side of
Manhattan and has a large queer population. According to
the 2005 US Census Bureau, the median family income is
$43,434. The racial makeup of Manhattan is 56.8% White,
16.7% Black, 0.8% Native, 11.3% Asian, and 25.1%%
Latino/a. Conquest is known for its restaurant business in
addition to its bar and stage shows. The hours are 8:00 p.m.
to 4:00 a.m., Monday through Saturday, and 8:00 p.m. to
2:00 a.m. on Sundays. Both clubs are located within 500 ft
of a school, church, other sex venues, or residential area,
and thus have survived former mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s
1995 zoning laws (Delany 1999). Most of the bartenders,
security personnel, …
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