Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

The strip club is on South Tacoma Way, a 4-lane highway dotted with cheap motels, fast food joints, and auto lots. At 6pm Friday, the parking lot was nearly empty. The sign, which circles the whole roof, reads: “Déjà vu: We have a hundred beautiful girls and three ugly ones.”

We entered through a darkened hallway, at the end of which was a desk with a computer and woman behind it. From this vantage, the main space of the club is cut of from view. There is the sense of taking a little journey to a different, cloistered space: on that must be shrouded. From here, all you can see of the club are a series of backlit plastic posters which display up-and-coming Deja-Vu events. On each poster is a cluster of scantily dressed woman staring at the viewer in a teasing, flirtatious way.

The hostess asked if we’re there for job applications. She checked our IDs (the club is 18 and over) and we walked in.

The club is organized into areas of varying visibility and seclusion. Wrapping around the main spectator floor is a slightly raised balcony: near the entrance are curtained lap-dance booths, behind the main audience area are couches, big enough for two people of average girth to sit, bodies pressed at the sides. To the far side is the DJ/announcer booth, which is a box that is raised far above anything else.

The main floor circles the stage. There is a row of chairs that nearly touch the stage, and clusters of chairs and little tables behind. All of the chairs are on wheels. The stage, pulsating with strobe lights, is the only brightly lit location in the main club area. The audience area has regions of varying darkness, defined by red lights.

I entered with a number of preconceptions about this space and about this type of performance: this is a spacer of direct commodity exchange, where men, possessors of the gaze and sexual consumers, would look on at woman as object, who would dance the same old dance to gratify him and reap the ensuing economic benefit. I’ll get to how these ideas were revised by both the experience and theories we’ve been encountering, but its interesting to note how the people in the space interpreted us.

In this particular strip club on this night, Sarah and I were the only females not on the payroll. Not long after the hostess took our juice-bar orders, a man with a walkie-talkie and ponytail sat in an adjacent chair and wheeled over next to me. “What are you writing?” He asked. I asked if it mattered… He explained that he had to safeguard people’s personal information.

-“If you want to write names or specifics, you gotta ask the girls."

-No one came up to us much after that- someone asked if it was our birthday.

Most of the audience arrived alone and took care to sit a few seats away from other audience members. Dancers, when not up on the main stage, would circle the audience, chatting and flirting, mostly with the loners, sometimes with the groups.

As much as the audience comes to see a performance, they are also performing. There is a set of codes that govern the behavior of the strip club attendees, and because it is an interactive performance, the audience’s response shapes the stage performance. These are codes that aren’t posted on the wall, but understood. I think I have a vague understanding of them, though I’ve only been to a couple of strip clubs:
-Only go up to the front row if you plan on actively tipping. People would go up if a dancer caught their fancy, and leave after her set

-The dancers can touch you anywhere on your body, but you can’t touch them.

-Don’t spend too much time looking at other audience members was a code that I assumed, though a man stared at us, instead of the stage, for quite awhile.

The stage itself looks like a sexed-up religious shrine, symmetrical, lit, raised. This place reminds me of Genets The Balcony and for good reason: this is a sort of separate space where certain discourses about gender and power can be enacted, and be put into play. Symbols of Man and Woman caricaturized and fetishized, interact.

Bordering the stage were two television screen that constantly showed silhouettes of hip-shaking female forms dancing to the music… The strip club and strip performance seems to be very much about the silhouette: outlines or reenactments of gendered rituals come before, reenacted in real time but as a reflection of discourse. The strip club can be seen, in DeLauretis’s sense, as a technology of gender. The visual signs we see here can signify a certain construction of gendered ideals.

 

D quote: The construction of gender goes on today through the various technologies of gender (cinema) and institutional discourses (theory) with power to control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote, implant representations of gender.

 

I’d like to restate Julia’s Butler quote from Tues lecture:

Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals, over time, to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural form of being.

The strip club is a garrulous and blatant example of these repeated interactions and discourses, in which male bodies are made to appear more male, Capital M , man. For instance, the announcer and DJ (who named each new dancer) was male and spoke in the style of sports announcing: “This is Round #1, “ he said “Wide and center, we have, Sugar!”- this highlights what a game this type of performance is, but also reinscribes male gender upon the spectators.

The slippage between female bodies and a sort of Capital W woman are easily seen in the club: we were treated as aberrations in the strip club because, within the space, we were difficult to interpret. The caricatured genders and sexualities manifested here did not fit with our bodies.

Though few would argue that a strip club is a space for “natural gender” it does represent the stylized, extreme extensions of many discourses on gender, sexuality and power relations: in which we can see the male gaze on the sexualized female, who must be both displayed for and protected from the masculine sexuality. This notion of protection is everywhere in the design and rules of the strip club. The dancer controls physical interaction with spectators; the women’s bathrooms are behind a door marked private, in a brightly-lit hall.

This space is an arena where female sexuality is displayed and protected, projected and obscured. Dancers spent most of their respective performances turned away from the audience, turned instead toward the fan-shaped mirror at the back of the stage. They stared at the audience and their own reflection at once. The mirror can act as a division between the lived identity of the dancing individual and the audience. The dancer can then more fully meld with the capital W Woman image of “the Stripper,” as bodies play with discourse in ways far more overt than “outside.”

This is a space for a high-stakes type of gender play: with certain notions of normative sexualities, in a space separate from the “real world.” These little rituals happen every day and night at Deja-Vu.