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University of California Press

Neon Wasteland

On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town

by Susan Dewey (Author)
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Feb 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780520948310

Read an Excerpt

One

Introduction

Chantelle's New Job

This is a real blue-collar place. At first I thought it was pretty weird that you came here to write a book about us, because I always thought that women with PhDs and all, well, they don't usually come into a place like this. I guess it's different for you, because you grew up like all of us did and so you understand why our lives are the way they are. So this isn't a place

About the Book

This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated “rust belt” of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, Neon Wasteland shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

About the Author

Susan Dewey is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and adjunct in International Studies at the University of Wyoming. She is the author of Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India and Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
2. Feminized Labor and the Classed Body
3. Everyday Survival Strategies
4. Being a Good Mother in a "Bad" Profession
5. Pseudointimacy and Romantic Love
6. Calculating Risks, Surviving Danger
7. Body Work and the Feminization of Poverty
8. Conclusion

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

“Dewey contributes to a growing wave of qualitative research on the sex industry by providing deep ethnographical insight into the lives of five poor women who work at a low-end strip club.”
Choice
“Fresh. . . . As keen as it is thorough. . . . Neon Wasteland is a provocative, highly readable analysis.”
Social & Cultural Geography
"Through heartfelt ethnographic storytelling, Dewey provides a nuanced treatment of exotic dancers. This is a wonderful book."—Patty Kelly, author of Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel

"Neon Wasteland is a riveting and compelling book. Dewey's reflections and analyses are richly descriptive and insightful. She poignantly relates the stories of these women but also never lets the reader forget the stark social inequalities that are part of these women's daily lives."—Jennifer K. Wesely, PhD, co-author of Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women