Manufacturing the gentleman's girl: Beauty, class, and the adult entertainment club

In its formulation of the classy strip club, the adult entertainment industry incorporates a discursive relationship between class imagery, especially as the industry uses this to address consumers, and aesthetics, particularly hierarchical representations of woman's beauty. For the author (a former stripper at the adult entertainment club Pure Platinum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida), this relationship shores up the industry's structure, enabling its prolific connections to and with other cultural forms and practices, popular as well as marginal. Assuming adult entertainment occupies merely a cultural margin hinders insight into these important power relations. Grasping them and their changeability requires recognition that the industry shares material and ideological ties with forms more mainstream, such as Miss USA, Barbie, and Snow White.