Working Out Gender

46     The appropriate performance of emotion of female strippers is determined by the normative emotive standards or feeling rules of the contemporary strip trade. As Liepe-Levinson suggests, the appropriate performance of the female stripper should elicit: sexiness, desire, femininity and availability. Eaves writes: "Our job wasn't just to be naked, it was to look and behave as though the customers really turned us on. For a convincing performance, men were willing to pay" (85). This need for the stripper to manage her emotions is constant. Bruckert writes: "A woman working in a strip club as a stripper has, first and foremost, to act like a stripper; whether she is on stage or not she is always performing" (71). Strippers may not actually be feeling sexy or desirable while they are working, but they must continuously manage this impression. Lauri Lewin writes: "And even those dancers who seemed to love the rug with sexual abandon [. . .] felt no passion, did not get turned on, only acted the part" (74; emphasis added).

47     Much of the emotion management, adherence to feeling rules, and performances of emotion of female strippers appear to be done in terms of surface acting. The surface acting of the stripper entails such things as: the bump or grind in her dance routine, the extended gaze at the male patron, a blown kiss to another dancer, a white dress to appear innocent, a red satin gown to appear seductive, or even the physical alterations she has done to her body, i.e. enlarged breasts. Surface acting is done to convince the audience that the dancer is feeling something that she is not actually feeling. At the surface level, it is the performances of the body that are key; the language of the body communicates the emotions of the stripper.

48     It also appears common for strippers to engage in what Hochschild termed "deep acting," whereby they actively attempt to alter their inner feelings so that they are not in tension with the feeling rules of their work. Hochschild suggests that deep acting is best achieved by drawing on emotional memories (35). One stripper, Lauri Lewin, does this by imagining herself playing out sexual fantasies with her lover while she is on stage to help feign her performances of sexual passion to the audience. An interesting inner dialogue she describes while on stage went as follows: "In his room we kissed tentatively. His lips were soft . . .  I push him back on the bed . . . I began to release myself to an intensity of passion that far surpassed sensation" (80-81). A patron in the club then interrupted her inner dialogue. She continues: "Take off the bra! A man at the Nudie-Tease yelled . . . the voices at the Nudie-Tease brought me back" (80-81). Frank suggests that deep acting lends an aura of authenticity to the performances of strippers. Building on Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, she suggests that authenticity is a form of symbolic capital in the field of stripping. Similarly, Diane Reay suggests a new Bourdieuian species of capital that she refers to as "emotional capital." The idea here is that a stripper can accumulate emotional capital through the appropriate performances of emotion in her everyday work. Keeping with Bourdieu's framework, this emotion capital can be converted into other forms of capital, particularly economic capital. It is for this reason that Heidi Mattson trenchantly describes stripping as, "a perilous mixture of emotion and economics" (179).

49     According to Hochschild, the appropriate performance of emotion also requires the suppression of inappropriate emotions. This appears to be a difficult aspect of the performative work of strippers. A stripper names Blondie writes: "It's hard sometimes because you have to keep up. You can't be sad or depressed. You have to show this public image" (Futterman 46). Burana details the difficulty she found in suppressing her feelings of nervousness while working as a stripper. She writes:

I lie back, press my feet on the stage and push up onto my toes as I wind my torso and work my thong down. I roll over onto my side and straighten my legs, sending my thong flying. The lights are hot on my skin. Here I am, bare-assed on the last frontier. I start to float away from myself a little because I am nervous. But I'm pretty much ok. I stand up and try to stay in character. (Burana 174)

Burana reveals how difficult it can be for strippers to suppress their inappropriate emotions and avoid giving the audience any hints that what is going on in their minds and bodies may have little to do with their sexy and passionate performances. Bruckert details the account of a stripper who was unable to suppress her inappropriate emotions while on stage. She writes:

I'll listen to music and I'll watch TV and I'll just dance. I've been doing it, you know when you do it so often you're looking straight at people's eyes but you're kind of looking over yonder, looking at the TV there. You're doing your little crawl and you're giggling inside 'cause there's some show on. I mean I've lost it completely because I was doing a show and I was trying to talk to someone and The Simpsons came on TV and I started pissing myself laughing . . . I walked off the stage. (Bruckert 71)

Hochschild, as well as Thoits, would label such an example "emotional deviance", as the stripper's performance of sexiness and desire broke down because her inappropriate inner feelings were visible on the surface through her laughter.

50     A common emotion that strippers must suppress is anger. In their daily work, strippers must continuously deal with intoxicated men, many of whom have little respect for women and strippers in particular. Bruckert suggests that strippers are able to manage their feelings of anger and resentment towards customers through "hidden transcripts" or inner dialogues where the stripper tries to create scenarios, draw on emotive memories, and put things in perspective all within her own thoughts. One method of doing this, that Bruckert suggests, is to perceive the male patron as a small child; flight attendants are taught to use a similar technique to deal with unruly customers (Hochschild). Similarly, both Black and Bruckert suggest that strippers will often convince themselves that the men in the audience are just "wallets," or anonymous individuals to profit from. Hochschild also suggests the importance of teamwork or "collective emotion labor" to help social actors suppress inappropriate emotions. This is where the back stage region of the strip trade becomes especially important to strippers, as it gives them a region to talk with other dancers, and calm their inappropriate feelings — providing these feelings are not towards other dancers. Bruckert suggests that this is becoming problematic in the contemporary strip trade as increased industry competitiveness and instability is causing a decrease in stripper camaraderie.