ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between exotic dancing and power at the macro level. We examine how exotic dancing organizations respond to market forces and how that is related to dancers’ power. Data show that organizations use rules, policies, and practices to ensure a standardized product that fits their market niche. Women act within the available market structure, molding their bodies and sexuality for efficiency, predictability, control, and calculability, thereby resulting in the routinization and McDonaldization of their bodies and sexuality. Analyzing through the lens of feminist theories of power, dancers, unlike at the micro and macro levels, do not have control over the power to influence these market forces but rather recreate the normative definitions of sexuality and beauty. As a result, the economic power of women relies heavily on maintaining sex appeal in ways that exaggerate the differences between men and women and recreate normative gender inequality, reproducing ideologies that relegate women’s economic power to the bodily services of men. These findings reveal the interpenetration of market forces in our most intimate spaces, our bodies and relationships, and the importance of problematizing the taken-for-granted idea that ‘sex sells’ in building a feminist theory of power.
