Beauty work, race and age in strip clubs: a case study from Atlantic Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This MA thesis aims to address the gap in research about how beauty work in the strip trade is influenced by popular ideas about race, age, and gender. It documents in detail the beauty work practices of a small sample of women in the strip trade industry in Atlantic Canada. Using ethnographic fieldwork; observation; and focused, unstructured interviews, the thesis is consistent with Ronald Weitzer’s “polymorphous paradigm,” which emphasizes the diversity of personal experiences and power relations by people in erotic entertainment. This study of strippers’ challenges, experiences, and strategies found that: (1) many of the women interviewed were not fully aware of the amount of money and time they devoted to keeping or improving their appearances; (2) the beauty work performed by interviewees reveals both subtle and blatant prejudices with respect to race, age, and gender which defends and privileges traditional Eurocentric values of whiteness, youth, and femininity; (3) it is suggested, although it cannot be conclusively proven with a small sample, that race (not age) is the primary factor determining opportunities to work in the strip trade in Atlantic Canada. The interviewees had different levels of job satisfaction, self-esteem, and experiences of blatant and subtle racism and colorism. It is argued that the workplace culture of the strip club called “Pearls” operates to defend, enforce, and maintain traditional Eurocentric values which privilege and reproduce a hierarchy of desire in which whiteness is at the top. Consequently, race operates as one of the primary principles by which the relationships between the management, strippers, and clientele are organized.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".