Flexible Workers

Labour, Regulation and the Political Economy of the Stripping Industry

Teela Sanders, Kate Hardy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138665347
• eBook ISBN: 9781317755326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Striptease and other types of erotic dance increasingly make up a large, lucrative and visible part of the sex industries in the United Kingdom and 'lap dancing' has become the focus of many important contemporary debates about gender, work and sexuality. This new book from Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy moves away from the more traditional focus on the relations between dancers and customers, to a focus on regulation and the working conditions experienced by those working in stripping work. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participant observation with dancers, managers, regulators and other staff, Sanders and Hardy present the first ever nationwide study of the stripping industry and the working lives of those within it.

The book explores the reasons for the expansion of the industry in the United Kingdom and the experiences, opinions and perspectives of those that produce and shape it. Placing dancers' voices centre stage, it examines the wider political economy which shapes dancers' engagement in employment in the stripping industry, pointing towards the wider conditions of the labour market and growing privatisation of Higher Education as explanatory factors for its labour supply. In suggesting a new feminist politics of stripping, dancers voice their own political awareness of erotic dance and an intersectional analysis of solidarity with workers in the stripping industry is foregrounded.

Presenting a 360 degree view of the industry, this ground-breaking study presents systematic evidence for the first time on this area of social life which has become central as a strategy of survival, class mobility and urban accumulation. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students across the fields of criminology, sociology, geography, labour studies and gender studies, as well as regulators, activists and even dancers themselves.

1 Locating the strip-based entertainment industry

DOI: 10.4324/9781315798035-2

Introduction

This chapter sets the scene of the strip-based industry in the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We start by contextualising the industry within the broader sociological changes of the night-time economy expansion and the economic and cultural mainstreaming of the sex industry on a macro and global level as well as at a local level. It is in this initial section that we problematise whether strip work is actually part of the sex industries, arguing that it does constitute part of the sex industries in that what is commodified in this exchange is a particularly sexualised service and labour process. Second, we sketch out the historical landscapes that provide the backdrop for the development of the industry and demonstrate the ways in which it has changed, particularly in relation to new regimes of licensing and regulation. Third, we map out the previous and current characteristics and organisation of the industry, in particular the business models of strip venues in the UK. Finally, we outline dancers’ labour process and the product that is produced, exchanged and consumed in these contexts before returning to it in more depth in following chapters (see Chapter 6).

Mainstreaming striptease

The boom from the mid-1990s to 2008 particularly centred on the geographic space of the City of London with the circulation of capital there and its wider financial markets laying the foundations for the growth of the modern-day ‘lap dancing’ industry. ¹ ‘Corporate masculinity’ (Allison 1994), in which ‘a particular masculinized set of performances is more highly valorized than other ways of being in the workplace’ (McDowell 2010: 653) is certainly accountable for many of the practices in the consumption of lap dancing: conspicuous consumption in terms of the purchase of unnecessary and overpriced drinks, cultures of excess, high disposable incomes and corporate credit cards. Kynaston (2001: 791) has pointed to the ‘City cultural supremacy’ in the ways in which the values and practices of the City have reshaped other areas of social life, most obvious, but not limited to, the use of metrics, league tables and emphasis on short-term performance across the business world and also in the NHS and education (Lancaster 2010). Indeed the strip industry markets itself specifically to a city – or simply corporate – male audiences: ‘Want to impress your clients? Show them our latest figures’ (website marketing from large strip club in northern England). Not limited to practices of business but also to cultural consumption, the cultures of excess that the City has produced led to cultural mimesis, as people visiting high street nightlife sought to mimic the consumption patterns of the elite (Hadfield 2009), leading to the growth of stripping from the capital centre across other towns and cities.

This expansion from the capital to the regions engendered a further spatial shift, with permanent venues offering erotic dance moving from a position on the social and geographical peripheries to a more central position in high streets, town and cities and cultural imaginaries and practices. Sexual desire has always been a motivator to enter city night-time spaces (Arnold 2010), yet the spatial segregation of sites of sexual consumption has always been a key method of policy enforcement activities in attempts to ‘cleanse the streets’ and move sexual commerce out of view of everyday life (Hubbard 2002; Hubbard and Sanders 2003; Coulmont and Hubbard 2010).

The spatial ordering of the strip industry since the 2003 Licensing Act has been important in generating perceptions of a ‘growing tide’ of strip venues. These changes were in part ‘felt’ perceptions, as venues appeared increasingly in city centres and spaces of middle-class consumption, rather than their historic working-class spatialities. This felt perception was therefore due to the increased visibility of strip club venues rather than necessarily a highly significant quantitative increase. The ways in which this shift from the margins to the mainstream has occurred are explicable in terms of a number of interlocking economic, legal, cultural and social processes, including the rise of the City culture; the expansion of the night-time economy; regulatory changes; the increased visibility of erotic dance in media, fashion and advertising; and changes in the nature of work and employment in the UK.

Over the past two decades, the industry has become increasingly visible and accessible to a wider audience as it has increasingly gained ground as a regular feature of the broader night-time economy (hereafter, NTE) within urban spaces of night-time consumption, diversifying from an elite practice to a frequent feature of popular culture and social rituals, not least including ‘stag dos’. Marketing to a more upmarket paying customer with disposable income for such luxuries, Colosi (2010: 23) notes how the range of independently owned, chain and franchised venues have branded themselves as a lifestyle choice for the young professionals, service and finance sector employees. The marketing of the strip venue has moved away from overt signs of sexualisation (in part because of licensing requirements), to merge with the shop fronts and bars of the ordinary NTE. Venues seek to appear more ‘luxurious’ than the usual pub next door, with a potentially safer environment through visibly increased security and door personnel.

Economically, the rise of the NTE in post-war Britain provided the landscape for urban ‘renewal’ and a change in the focus and purpose of the cities, as leisure and consumption became significant in the infrastructure of how the city was designed, regenerated and promoted in the move from an industrial to a postindustrial era (Hobbs et al. 2000). The city moved from being an industrial hub, where manufacturing dominated, to an economy where the service and leisure sectors became the main forms of employment and activity (Chatterton and Hollands 2003). The NTE came to be seen as a key player in facilitating urban growth and prosperity, as it emerged as a powerful manifestation of post-industrialism (Hobbs et al. 2000). In this context, the sex industries also found an enabling space for integration into the urban economy (Hubbard et al. 2008).

Instead of ghettoisation in backstreets, away from main leisure zones, erotic dance venues now nestle side by side with ordinary pubs, bars, restaurants and late night venues. As deprived residential and business districts of the city were swept aside to be replaced by multi-national consumer businesses based in state-of-the-art luxury shopping centres and leisure complexes (see examples from Liverpool and Manchester) alongside diversified daytime and night-time leisure spots (such as Manchester’s gay village/Canal Street – see Binnie and Skeggs, 2004), which beckon the leisured classes to take part in hedonistic pleasures, so too were spaces made for discreet sex businesses and activities. This integration into the general NTE did not happen by chance, but was enabled and facilitated by broader economic principles and processes. Responding to other marketing processes of ‘niche’ and increasingly specialised goods and services, striptease has sought to diversify and expand into new untapped markets, particularly focused around changing gendered consumption to cater for women and non-heterosexual customers (Wosick-Correa and Joseph 2008; Pilcher 2011). The strip industry is a diverse one, and whilst the main corporate businesses are aimed at men, and have a female-only dancer workforce, there is increasing variety evident to attend and entice all tastes, preferences and pockets.

This economic mainstreaming has been facilitated by policies encouraging free market economics, entrepreneurship and a premium on individual choice rather than state control, censorship and centralised regulation (Brents and Sanders 2010). While authorities have grappled with achieving a balance between the demand for sexual entertainment with the concerns of communities, property prices, public safety and crime (Hubbard et al. 2009), there have been few legal barriers to the embedding of the industry in urban economies. Geographies of erotic dance therefore contrast with these other spaces of sexual labour and consumption and it is mainly more traditional and direct forms of sex work, such as street prostitution, that has borne the brunt of prohibition and criminalisation (see Sanders 2012 for a review), whilst legal industries have, in contrast, gained visibility and centrality, achieving a real subsumption of women’s sexual labour. Emulation of the practices of more ‘legitimate’ businesses in terms of corporate investment, management protocols and procedures, advertising, marketing and distribution and the ‘upscaling’ or corporatisation of image and aesthetic have furthered the establishment of erotic dance venues as mainstream.

Cultural factors have also facilitated this visibility and expansion, as the commercialisation of the erotic has taken place through key institutions such as media, television, advertising, fashion, retail and beauty industries. Fensterstock (2006) explains how ‘stripper chic’ is embroiled in (American) popular culture, from daytime TV, reality shows, high street fashion, music industry production and celebrity past times. This is notable in cultural trends such as ‘pole for fitness’ as women engage in the activity as a sport (Holland 2010) and hen parties collectively trialling pole dancing, while stag parties engage in the more professionalised side of the industry. Further, ‘celebrity culture’ has also helped to normalise the place of strip clubs in the NTE as famous figures are regularly reported attending the upmarket clubs in the capital. ²

The expansion of and change within the strip industries must also be placed in the broader context of the relationship and contradiction between ‘rationalized, disciplined production alongside free and hedonistic consumption’ (Korczynski and Ott 2004: 575), as well as – more specifically – the growth of sexual consumption, sexual services and labour. According to the ‘puritan by day, hedonist by night’ thesis (the notion that one should use the day productively), working hard to produce value is embedded alongside the desire to engage in unrestrained consumption outside of the workplace, particularly in nightscapes. The ‘temporal and spatial buffer’ (Korczynski and Ott 2004: 576) between ‘work’ and ‘play’ breaks down in the context of the corporate customer with a corporate expense account, ostensibly outside the workplace and work time, but still essentially engaged in practices related to value production. However, the emphasis on play, consumption and night-time hedonism explains the ability of the strip industry to have expanded beyond these elite spaces of consumption. Such consumption has been enabled by the growing commodification of expanding areas of social life, as an inevitable consequence of the growing marketisation of society and the ubiquitous spread of neo-liberalism. Capital’s expansionist tendencies compel it to exploit increasing facets of human life, commodifying spaces, places and relations previously outside value production. The commodification of sex represents yet one of the latest elements of this pattern, alongside other social goods such as education and water, for example. Yet there remains a ‘schizophrenia’ (Altman 2002) amongst the politicians, governments and international institutions that promote the market and neo-liberal policy as economic panaceas. While encouraging the commoditisation of all forms of life, the marketisation of human resources and social interaction, they tend to remain censorious about sex and its sale (Altman 2002).

Some have argued that ‘normalisation’ of the growth of sexual commerce has been co-constitutive of the ‘pornographication’ of culture and society in the West (Passonen et al. 2007). McNair (2002) has defined culture that encourages sexual images as everyday, sexualised gazing and revelation as the ‘striptease culture’, leading to what Attwood (2006) has termed the ‘sexed up’ society. Such cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Font Chapter
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: beyond the stripping wars
• 1 Locating the strip-based entertainment industry
• 2 From pathology to labour: the discursive landscape of strip clubs, workers and regulation
• 3 Empty shell licensing: law, reform and Sexual Entertainment Venues
• 4 The race to the bottom: working conditions and value production in the strip club
• 5 Professionals, pragmatists and strategists: understanding labour supply in the UK strip industry
• 6 ‘No dancer ever earns money out of the pole’: attentive economies of stripping work
• 7 Falling through the regulatory gap: managing and licensing stripping
• 8 Speaking back: the feminist and class politics of stripping
• Conclusions: proliferation, stagnation or decline? The UK strip industry now and beyond
• Dancers interviewed
• Index