Staging sexuality: Encoding, embedding and enacting lap dancing work

While the study of emotional and aesthetic labour in interactive service work is well established, less attention has been paid to the context in which these modes of labour are experienced and made sense of. With that in mind, this paper focuses on emotional and aesthetic labour in the lap dancing industry considering how work in this particular sector and setting is staged. The study draws from three modes of data collection, website analysis, observations and interviews, which were selected to focus, respectively, on understanding how a bodily-prescriptive heteronormativity is encoded, embedded and enacted within and through the socio-materiality of the industry. Specifically, the paper focuses on how this heteronormativity is encoded through the industry’s online presence, how it is embedded in the situated context of the clubs themselves, and finally, how this is reflected in, understood and enacted, by women working in the lap dancing industry. The discussion focuses on how the industry is staged both materially and metaphorically, and on how various socio-material entwinements serve to condition and compel particular expectations and behaviours. The theme of touch also emerges as a point of crisis in an industry underpinned by a promise of ‘something more’, a promise that practices of encoding, embedding and enacting heteronormativity serve to perpetuate.