Exotic Dance and Other Stories of Transformations– An Ethnographic Study in Swedish Strip Clubs

Abstract: The main question of this thesis is how in the social world of stripping the dominant order of symbolic values is renegotiated and exotic dancers undertake processes of transformation. The aim of the study is to look deeper inside those changes, and show how they are contextual to the reality in which they take place. The research has been conducted through participant observations and interviews with ten strippers in two strip clubs of a Swedish city from November 2014 to May 2015. Dancers subjectivize themselves through a personal redefinition of dominant narratives. How do they relate to the public display of female erotica and what consequences do they face for breaking the accepted standards of respectability? Their projection of femininity is one based in the embodied imaginary of an ‘exaggerated’ working class femininity, and this sheds light on the performative nature of gender, and how it is marked by class. Furthermore, narratives about nakedness are also renegotiated: in performance the stripped body is naturalized and re-sexualized. Finally, strippers personally redefine bodily intimacy and accessibility. The transformative potential of striptease is put into practice in the lived experiences of strippers, and, at the same time, it remains a ‘potential’ because it does not manage to reach beyond the segregated, ‘abnormal’ space of the club, into the performers’ and audience’s wider social worlds. I suggest that a feminist alliance between sex workers and sex workers’ theorists is needed in order to overcome the stigma that surrounds striptease and to eventually liberate its subversive potential.