Presenter: Amber Bryan
Mentor: Lamia Karim
Poster: 10
Major: Women’s and Gender Studies
Exotic dancing has been studied widely in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and women’s and gender studies with scholars such as Bernadette Barton and Katherine Frank arguing that women become exotic dancers because they are suffering from repetition compulsion, causing dancers to follow intimacy scripts both at work and outside of work. However, these arguments, as well as the past research conducted, have not adequately addressed the issue of how exotic dancing may affect the sexuality of the women working in the exotic dancing profession.
My research has examined and compared the participatory sexual encounters of women before becoming dancers to their participatory sexual encounters after becoming dancers. The rarely acknowledged issue of working as an exotic dancer and the effects it has had on women’s sexual interest in other women was a particular point of interest throughout this study. Through ethnographic and empirical research, I have determined that working as an exotic dancer does have an impact on the women’s sexuality, who they choose to engage in sexual encounters with, and how frequently the women participated in sexual encounters outside of work, though the outcome was different for each woman. The data also shows that, while some of the women did experience an increase in sexual activity with multiple partners, most of the stereotypes about exotic dancers, that they are whores or lesbians, did not hold true.