Claiming the bodies of exotic dancers: The problematic discourse of commodification

Much like the meanings of black bodies examined in Chapter Fourteen, which are framed within existent ideological discursive formations forged under unequal and unjust social circumstances, the meanings of female exotic dancers’ bodies are equally subject to a colonizing gaze that originates in misunderstanding and the desire to foster theoretical agendas rather than give voice to subjects of research. In this chapter Carol Rambo, Sara Rene Presley, and Don Mynatt show how academic researchers frame strippers and stripping according to the competing logic of victimization and deviantization. A thorough review of the sociological literature demonstrates how the body of an exotic dancer is very much a contested socio-semiotic fi eld, and yet - as interviews with dancers show - one that is reclaimed by the women themselves. Rambo, Presley and Mynatt thus provide us with the quintessential socio-semioticinteractionist strategy: The uncovering and the exposition of ideological meaning by social agents themselves