"Making a Spectacle of Herself": On Women's Bodies in the Skin Trades
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we undertake a reading of erotic dance/dancers through the body lens attending to questions of meanings and subjectivity.Women's bodies in strip clubs emerged as contested terrain so that while the axes of beauty, sexuality and labour were oppressive, they were also the sites of subversion and resistance.Additionally, the research revealed erotic dancers to be simultaneously defined as in danger and dangerous.We conclude that their ownership of sexuality as spectacle and their spectacle of sexuality threatens patriarchal discourses and practices.RESUME Dans cet article nous faisons une lecture de la danse/de danseuses exotiques a travers la lentille du corps, en pretant attention aux questions de sens et de subjectivite.Le corps des femmes dans les boites de strip-tease est apparu comme etant un terrain conteste qui tandis que les axes de beaute, de sexualite et de travail etaient oppressants, ils etaient aussi les sites de subversion et de resistance.De plus, les recherches revelent que les danseuse exotiques sont definies comme etant en danger et aussi dangereuses.Nous concluons que leur possession de la sexualite en tant que spectacle menace les discours et les pratiques patriarcales.Curiously, at a time when the discrete object called the body is being theoretically deconstructed, technologically fragmented, and politically reterritorialzied, it has become an object of intense intellectual fascination, a realm for futuristic fantasy, and, indeed, a grounding point of profound social anxiety.(Terry and Urla 1995,3)The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world.Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.(Atwood 1994) You can get fired for anything.Being too fat, for having a big ass, because the owner doesn't like you, for looking too young.I've been fired for looking too young.(Sarah) 3 I found I liked being a sex object, because the context was appropriate.I resented being treated as a sex object on the street or at the office.But as an exotic dancer that is my job.(Sundahl 1987, 176) Pole work is a lot of hanging upside down, it's a lot of balance, muscle technique.It's hard to look sexy when you're upside down and all the blood's rushing to your head!(Diane)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".