Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research

Abstract

This article explores two interrelated issues in the exotic dance literature: (1) claims that research on strip clubs is virgin, unstudied territory, and not taken seriously, and (2) the unrelenting focus on negotiations of power between men and women in the clubs. It argues that the study of commercial sex — and here specifically of exotic dance — is itself culturally informed. Thus, there has been a great deal of studying in strip clubs, but less exploration of the ways that these venues, and those of us who study them, are implicated in larger social, cultural, political, economic, and intimate relationships, processes, and patterns of meaning. A cultural approach to the study of strip clubs (Agustín, 2005) opens our investigation of these important sites of sexual-economic exchange in theoretically innovative and timely ways.