Introduction: Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love

Abstract

Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love explores the complex, messy, and contradictory interactions between male regulars and female exotic dancers at two clubs, Flame and Glitters,¹ in the New England area. Between 1996 and 2000, my roles at Glitters and Flame alternated between dancer and researcher as I moved between two clubs providing vastly different services—all nude with no contact to semi-tofully nude with high levels of contact in the form of lap dancing. In the midst of laboriously transcribing interviews, writing detailed fieldnotes, and learning “to work” the pole, the confounding dynamics at play in the clubs occupied my days and nights. Shifting between the classroom and the lap dance room, I began to understand the intersections of space and subjectivity for dancers and regulars. Tangled and messy, I witnessed and experienced the manner in which fantasy, desire, and power shaped the relations between dancers and regulars. I watched the savvy ways dancers used strategies of subversion against the owners and regulars of the clubs and the tears shed when these strategies, at times, failed. Fascinated by dancers’ discussions of their work and regulars’ proclamations of love, I understood the leaky boundaries of concepts such as “consumer power.”