Strip Club by Kim Price-Glynn is an analysis of her 14 month ethnography at a strip club named The Lion’s Den. Kim Price-Glynn says she chose The Lion’s Den because of a connection with Angela, a student stripper and cocktail waitress at The Lion’s Den, who told Price-Glynn about an opening there. Angela also said she would give Price-Glynn a strong recommendation. Angela’s recommendation would be a very strong one because of her very good reputation at the Lion’s Den shown by having both titles of being “the club’s darling” and “Steve’s favorite”. So, Kim Price-Glynn had a pretty easy entrance into The Lion’s Den from her connection with Angela.
Before starting her shift at the Lion’s Den, Kim Price-Glynn told Steve that her main goal was
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to conduct her research, and not to have a permanent job. Steve quickly agreed to her terms with an interest towards the final published version of her research. Also, Price-Glynn’s conversation with Steve gave her coveted work hours with full discretion to conduct her study. Price-Glynn’s research focus was an examination of the organizational aspects of strip clubs. She gives a fairly in-depth explanation of her data through stories, interviews, and her own personal experiences. The main drawback of her study is that it lacks representativeness. At that time, The Lion’s Den was a lower spectrum strip club. I cannot be sure if it improved after reading this book because I can only speculate as to which strip club she conducted her research at. She also describes the surrounding city as small, isolated, and emphasized by its Chamber of Commerce. From her descriptions about both The Lion’s Den, and its surrounding city, we can see that it lacks some generalizability. It would have been nice to see how her findings at The Lion’s Den would have contrasted with an urban strip club, or an upper spectrum strip club. While she does have a limitation on her study’s generalizability, I still think she wrote a good book.
The compositional balance between her interviews, and personal experiences to her explanations was really good. The three most important findings I believe Price-Glynn writes about in Strip Club is the stripper paradox, gender inequality, and the risks of working in a strip club. First, the stripper paradox is by far the most important because it showcases the irony of The Lion’s Den. Women are the main attracting point for most strip clubs, but at The Lion’s Den women have the least amount of power there. As I will explain later, women are the reason why the men have their jobs, but women are not given respect. Many of the men who worked there believed that the women employees were fairly irresponsible people. This is a foundational reason for the gender inequality within the establishment. The women were at the bottom, and the men were at the top. Strippers often got it the worst because they lacked control over their jobs. The strippers often had their hours dictated to them by a “housemom” who chose who works the stage when, and when they would work the stage they had to pay for it. The pure irony of the main attraction having to pay to do their job is absurd. Also, the male employees who worked at The Lion’s Den thought they were “babysitting” the female employees. Using the word babysitting just feeds into a perpetual loop that the women who worked there are fairly irresponsible, and might not even give the chance to girls employed there to show their merit. This lack of responsibility would only be compounded by the risks that they faced when working there such as economic instability, physical, emotional, or psychological abuse, and job insecurity. I will explain those risks later. The main takeaway is that I chose those three findings as my most important findings because they showcase the mechanisms for the perpetuating loop that can make it very
unsatisfying to work in a strip club, especially if you are a female.
In “Scrubbing in Maine”by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich decides to work at the Maids Franchise so she can observe how the system was made for the maids. During her time being a maid she became emotionally impacted by the way her and the women were treated. Ehrenreich experiences in the article”Scrubbing in Maine,’’are the ones I can relate to even though both jobs don’t seem the same, the fact is my time spent working at Jewel is remarkably and depressingly similar to the time spent by Ehrenreich as a maid. In both instances employees are not really human, but are parts of a bigger machine and only Blue collar workers are stereotypes as uneducated unthinking individuals. As Blue collar jobs emphasized the routines, dehumanization of the employee, and loss of control over a person’s time. Workers do not engage in cognitive skills, but physical
We arrived at 1015 Folsom around 11.45pm. Many people were still lining up to get into the discotheque. I didn't know why people like to go to such a dark and noisy place like that. Anyway, people who were there are mostly dressed up. Some of them looked interesting. My attention went to an old man about 50-60 years old man who were already dressed up and ready to rock his world. I wondered why would the old man go to a nightclub. May be he was lonely or may be he was just looking for fun and excitement. Well, I didn't really know.
Even though her sister’s dress factory is small and the few ladies who work there do not get paid much, all them work hard and respect Estela. Relating to Heidi Schmidt’s article “Small, Foreign, and Female” work conditions are similar for women like Ana. "There are just three things I look for in entry-level hiring," Hossfeld recalls the manager saying. "Small, foreign, and female. You just do that right and everything else takes care of itself." (Schmidt). Women are seen as push overs in the work place and men expect them to be submissive when it comes to being in the workplace. Ana refuses to be a weak worker when she gets a job at Estela’s factory for the summer and makes all the other working women realize that they are beautiful and worth more than what is under their
The nightclub, is an aged small wood structure in Rhode Island. The club is reported to have a capacity of 182 people. On February 20th 2003, more then 400 fans packed into the small club to see a band. Although there are discrepancies between reports of how many people were in attendance, it is obvious that the number is well over twice the club's capacity.
Despite initial criticism at the time of release, Paul Verhoeven’s erotic drama, Showgirls (1995), has become a camp classic that challenges notions of identity and sexuality. The film traces Nomi Malone’s challenging journey from a stripper to a showgirl where she experiences the brutal and sexist economy of Las Vegas. Verhoeven (1995) uses the relationship between Nomi, Cristal and Zack to explore Sedgwick’s (1985, pp.23) concept of the erotic triangle. This is where the bond between two men seeking the attention of a women are usually more potent than “the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved” (Sedgwick, 1985 pp.21). However, this traditional representation of erotic triangle can be altered by the friendship between women.
People had a lot of money to spend after the war, new fashion trends were popping up in every corner of the United States, and the nightlife became the center for social life. When the outlawing of alcohol started, the nightlife died but only for a short time. Many jazz clubs known as speakeasies kept the nightlife going and soon enough everybody was trying to get into one. What made these clubs grow so much in popularity was that it was a social place where people were able to both buy alcohol and dance. Both men and women alike were in the same crowded room and there was socializing, flirting, and dancing between the two sexes. Clubs during the 1920’s had played a major role in taking down the wall that separated men and women.”For the first time, women went out to drink too and occupied the same dark small, dark spaces as
In Essentials of Cultural Anthropology, the book defines ethnography as “a written account of how a single human population lives” (Bailey & Peoples, 2014, p. 8). It seems to be such a simple definition to the multiple levels needed to make a successful ethnography as shown by Douglas Raybeck in Mad Dogs, Englishmen, and the Errant Anthropologist. These multiple levels of ethnographic methods include problems that often arise, the assimilation into a culture, and the many different ways of perceiving culture. This method of study is particularly unique to the social sciences because of the extensive amount of assimilation one does in order to interpret a society's culture. There is the need for a year-long period--occasionally even longer--
A woman in the workplace was common but they did not receive the pay they deserved. Often, a woman’s job was the same as the previous male, but they did these jobs for 53% of the male’s pay. (Tolman) Eventually many woman and men went on strike demanding equal pay.
In Notes from the Underground, Liza, the woman, is a prostitute so she does exactly what UM wants her to do. This being another sign of roles being based off of gender. Not many times do you hear of a male prostitute. No way is a prostitute a steady well paid job. This is the idea that women cannot make enough money to support a family by themselves. As for Linda in, Death of a Salesman, she really doesn’t even have a “real” job besides cleaning the house and cooking for Willy, Biff, and Happy. These are not real
When I was a kid my parents always took me to Nathdwara to take the blessings of Lord Krishna every now and then because my parents are so religious. So by going there several times I am also attached to that place. Actually Nathdwara is situated in Rajasthan state and I live in the state called Gujarat and in the city called as Ahmedabad. It takes six hours drive from my city to Nathdwara and this is the only nearest place where I could get mental peace. This is very important place for me and my family because it is a tradition of our family that whoever goes there gives free food to the hungry and poor people. We do so because we think that if we do good work in our life we will be allowed by god to go to the heaven. [The two states on the left are Gujarat and Rajasthan. One in light blue color is Gujarat with the arrows and on the top of it with cream color is Rajasthan. I live in the middle of the state and Nathdwara is at the border of the Rajasthan]
James P. Spradley (1979) described the insider approach to understanding culture as "a quiet revolution" among the social sciences (p. iii). Cultural anthropologists, however, have long emphasized the importance of the ethnographic method, an approach to understanding a different culture through participation, observation, the use of key informants, and interviews. Cultural anthropologists have employed the ethnographic method in an attempt to surmount several formidable cultural questions: How can one understand another's culture? How can culture be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed? What aspects of a culture make it unique and which connect it to other cultures? If ethnographies can provide answers to these difficult questions, then Spradley has correctly identified this method as revolutionary.
Personal experience and reflexivity should be used within anthropology as a tool to reflect on the culture that is being studied and not a refocusing of attention on the self. Works such as Dorinne Kondo’s “Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self,” use the idea of reflexivity as a mirror in which to view the culture being studied in a different manner. This use of reflexivity allows for the focus to stay on the culture being studied. A move away from this is the new branch of humanistic anthropology represented in this essay by Renato Rosaldo’s “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” and Ruth Behar’s “Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart” allows anthropologists to use reflexivity as a way to explore universal human feelings. For me, this is not the study of anthropology as much as self-reflexive psychology. The focus shifts from culture to self. The anthropologists completely understands the feelings of the people he/she is studying. I think that it is rather ambitious to state that emotion is univeral, and I do not think that it is the job of anthropologists to do so. The reflexive voice is a necessary aspect of ethnographic writing, but the anthropologist must be careful not to shift focus from concentrating on culture to concentrating on herself.
She worked as a stripper because she couldn't get another job that would pay her the same due to her race. Woman didn't get paid the same as men because they didn't have the same rights
In the poem “Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing” by Margaret Atwood the speaker, a stripper by the name of Helen, portrays aspects of both control and exploitation. The stripper portrays these images when she is on stage, and when she is attempting to justify her decisions with her conservative tone. These themes are evident in both situations, when she is on stage she is exploiting herself to persuade the men into paying her for her exotic dancing therefore controlling them. When she attempts to validate herself and her actions to us it reveals that she is in control of herself and she controls, if and how much she exploits herself.
Cultural anthropology has taught me a lot in such a short time. This class has been very eye opening to me and has made me think more about the different cultures around me and just how important it is to learn about them. One of the things I have learned is how religion is related to culture. Culture is behaviors of a community such as the food they make, the music they listen to, and the rituals they take part in. This can be very similar to religion because a culture is based off of their religious beliefs. Some cultures do not eat pig because it is against their religious beliefs. Some cultures listen to particular songs because it is based off of their religious beliefs. Another thing cultures relate closely to is languages. Without language