Shiny Chests and Heaving G-strings: A Night Out with the Chippendales

Abstract

This article focuses on the Chippendales show, the ways in which it is made available to its female audiences and the kinds of pleasures and participations it invites. It considers those discussions of male striptease which focus on the impossibility of the role-reversal of who looks at whom and the tendency to rank cultural forms like the male stripper against a measure of good/bad, progressive/conservative. This article takes issue with such accounts which fall back on the eroticized male body as an aberration, a transgression or a commodification of female sexuality while the object itself slips from view.