‘I’m just with the guys and we’re having a laugh’: Exploring normative masculinity in a lap-dancing club setting, as a heteronormative space

Drawing upon findings from an ethnographic study of lap-dancing club customers, and those generated from desk-based research which examined lap-dancing club websites and promotional materials, this article will argue that the lap-dancing club is a heteronormative space, in which male customers practice normative masculinity. In exploring normative masculinity, this article will draw upon the work of Connell (1995) , to demonstrate how different normative masculine practices are evident in the different attendance patterns of lap-dancing club customers. Overall, the findings discussed in this article make two important assertions, in support of Connell’s work. First, that masculinity is fluid, and context dependent; men can enact different versions of masculinity in different social spaces and situations. Second, normative masculine practices are pervasive, and encouraged, aided through heteronormative spaces such as lap-dancing clubs.

Putting sexualized labour in the picture: Encoding ‘reasonable entitlement’ in the lap dancing industry

This article is based on a semiotic analysis of corporate websites in the lap dancing industry. Forming part of a larger ethnographic study of the UK lap dancing industry, it focuses on how the exchange relationship between dancers and customers is shaped by the industry’s online presence. Methodologically, it draws on Hancock’s semiotic approach to the analysis of organizational artefacts and Brewis’s writing on the importance of understanding how sex work is constructed and perceived. The article shows the importance of corporate websites as virtual spaces that landscape customer expectations of the exchange relationship emphasizing how these expectations perpetuate, on the one hand, a very prescriptive range of body images shaping the performance and consumption of lap dancing work, and on the other, an ambiguous suggestion of open-ended possibility. The article argues that, in combination, this landscaping of prescription and possibility constitutes a powerful organization of anticipation underpinning perceptions of reasonable entitlement within the lap dancing exchange relationship considering how this impacts upon the dancers’ experiences of this relationship. The analysis highlights both the importance of virtual corporate spaces in landscaping interactive service exchanges, as well as the intensification that results from the ambiguity encoded within these spaces, requiring service providers to reconcile anticipation and experience, prescription and possibility, within the exchange relationship.

Politically Incorrect, Visually Incorrect

This chapter moves to an analysis of comix—a contemporary example of primitivism that continues to have a vexed relationship with cultural legitimacy. Ugliness in this chapter is recognizable as the visual aesthetics of underground comix and, as conceptual, nihilistic, and disempowering perspectives outlined as the mechanisms that restrict opting out of stigmatizing political and representational logics. Focusing on the depictions of such restrictions, this chapter explores the limits of allowable and expressible queer identities in the late twentieth century. Examining what affective states such as queer anger in Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Butch (1991–1999) and ethnic anxiety in Erika Lopez’s Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997) look like, this chapter reads visual discrepancies and identificatory impossibilities as specific issues of depicting nonnormatively gendered and non-white bodies.

Over ‘Sexed’ Regulation and the Disregarded Worker: An Overview of the Impact of Sexual Entertainment Policy on Lap-Dancing Club Workers - CORRIGENDUM

In the original article an error was contained within the following paragraph on page 242. It should have read; Under the new amendments, which were laid out in Section 27 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009 (Great Britain, 2009), lap-dancing clubs and other venues in which there is ‘any live display of nudity’ and where there have been more than ‘eleven occasions on which relevant entertainment has been so provided which fall (wholly or partly) within the period of 12 months ending with that time’ (Section 27, schedule 2Ai, Policing and Crime Act 2009) are now included as SEs.