G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
G-strings and sympathy: Strip club regulars and male desire. By Katherine Frank.
Katherine Frank is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Duke) who studied at Duke University, University of Michigan. Katherine’s primary research focus is based around gender and sexuality concepts, exploring the issues surrounding monogamy, marriage and swinging.
She is currently in the Department of Sociology at American University in Washington, DC, and a faculty associate at The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME.
The book reviewed is a first-hand account of anthropologist; Katherine Frank, uses participant observation to submerge and investigate the undiscovered, illusive world of being a stripper, the stigma that surrounds this unspoken business and the clientele these social spaces entice.
G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire(2002)
Frank's ethnography draws on her work as an exotic dancer in five strip clubs, as well as on interviews with over thirty regular customers--middle-class men in their late-twenties to mid-fifties. Reflecting on the customers' dual desires for intimacy and visibility, she explores their paradoxical longings for "authentic" interactions with the dancers, the ways these aspirations are expressed within the highly controlled and regulated strip clubs, and how they relate to beliefs and fantasies about social class and gender. She considers how regular visits to strip clubs are not necessarily antithetical to marriage or long-term heterosexual relationships, but are based on particular beliefs about marriage and monogamy that make these clubs desirable venues. Looking at the relative "classiness" of the clubs where she worked-ranging from the city's most prestigious clubs to some of its dive bars-she reveals how the clubs are differentiated by reputations, dress codes, cover charges,locations, and clientele, and describes how these distinctions become meaningful and erotic for the customers. Focusing on the
Katherine Frank is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Duke) who studied at Duke University, University of Michigan. Katherine’s primary research focus is based around gender and sexuality concepts, exploring the issues surrounding monogamy, marriage and swinging.
She is currently in the Department of Sociology at American University in Washington, DC, and a faculty associate at The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME.
The book reviewed is a first-hand account of anthropologist; Katherine Frank, uses participant observation to submerge and investigate the undiscovered, illusive world of being a stripper, the stigma that surrounds this unspoken business and the clientele these social spaces entice.
G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire(2002)
Frank's ethnography draws on her work as an exotic dancer in five strip clubs, as well as on interviews with over thirty regular customers--middle-class men in their late-twenties to mid-fifties. Reflecting on the customers' dual desires for intimacy and visibility, she explores their paradoxical longings for "authentic" interactions with the dancers, the ways these aspirations are expressed within the highly controlled and regulated strip clubs, and how they relate to beliefs and fantasies about social class and gender. She considers how regular visits to strip clubs are not necessarily antithetical to marriage or long-term heterosexual relationships, but are based on particular beliefs about marriage and monogamy that make these clubs desirable venues. Looking at the relative "classiness" of the clubs where she worked-ranging from the city's most prestigious clubs to some of its dive bars-she reveals how the clubs are differentiated by reputations, dress codes, cover charges,locations, and clientele, and describes how these distinctions become meaningful and erotic for the customers. Focusing on the