First Advisor

Priya Kapoor

Term of Graduation

Winter 1997

Date of Publication

1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Speech Communication

Department

Speech Communication

Language

English

Subjects

Stripteasers -- Interviews, Feminist theory, Women -- Social conditions

DOI

10.15760/etd.8158

Physical Description

1 online resource (133 pages)

Abstract

The discursively-constructed stereotype of stripper plays an important role in the ideology that sustains our system of sexual relations. This construction also interacts with and constrains the lived reality of actual women who earn their living in the stripping industry. This research attempts to examine this interaction by exploring the discourse that is generated by stripping industry participants. A long interview transcript is analyzed as a text to develop a feminist reading that focuses on the socio-cultural forces that make a particular story possible as well as necessary to tell. This story emerges, through the first-person account of a dancer-informant, as a form of moral resolution, an attempt to establish her "goodness" in the world. In deconstructing this story, however, it becomes clear that the elusive goodness for which she strives obligates her to self-defeating and self-subjugating behavior, and that this behavior is an important feature of strip joint interaction. Implicit in this finding is how the ideological nature of heterosexual conventions relies upon the exploitation of women's morality.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Comments

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39604

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