G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
by: Frank, Katherine

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 331 pages. Based on her experiences as a stripper in a city she calls Laurelton-a southeastern city renowned for its strip clubs-anthropologist Katherine Frank provides a fascinating insiders account of the personal and cultural fantasies motivating male heterosexual strip club regulars. Given that all of the clubs where she worked prohibited physical contact between the exotic dancers and their customers, in G-Strings and Sympathy Frank asks what-if not sex or even touching-the repeat customers were purchasing from the clubs and from the dancers. She finds that the clubs provide an intermediate space-not work, not home-where men can enjoyably experience their bodies and selves through conversation, fantasy, and ritualized voyeurism. At the same time, she shows how the dynamics of male pleasure and privilege in strip clubs are intertwined with ideas about what it means to be a man in contemporary America. Franks ethnography draws on her work as an exotic dancer in five clubs, as well as on her interviews with over thirty regular customers-middle-class men in their late-twenties to mid-fifties. Clean copy.