Draws a fascinating portrait of life and work inside the strip club

In Strip Club, Kim Price‒Glynn takes us behind the scenes at a rundown club where women strip out of economic need, a place where strippers’ stories are not glamorous or liberating, but emotionally demanding and physically exhausting. Strip Club reveals the intimate working lives of not just the women up on stage, but also the patrons and other workers who make the place run: the owner‒manager, bartenders, dejays, doormen, bouncers, housemoms, and cocktail waitresses.
Price‒Glynn spent fourteen months at The Lion’s Den working as a cocktail waitress, and her uncommonly deep access reveals a conflict‒ridden workplace, similar to any other workplace, one where gender inequalities are reproduced through the everyday interactions of customers and workers. Taking a novel approach to this controversial and often misunderstood industry, Price‒Glynn draws a fascinating portrait of life and work inside the strip club.

"For readers seeking insight into how strip club labor is organized in a predominantly white, working-class club that serves alcohol, Strip Club provides a generous dose of ethnographic detail." - American Journal of Sociology

"In this well-researched, engagingly written book, sociologist Price-Glynn examines the processes through which men and women wield, negotiate, and contest power in a strip cluba gendered organization. Through a combination of methodological approachesincluding in-depth interviews with strippers, patrons, and other employees; the author masterfully allows the reader entry into a subculture in which gender relations, power, and definitions of masculinity routinely are constructed, reconstructed, and challenged." - Choice Magazine

"Price-Glynn has a real knack for what anthropologists and sociologists call 'thick description,' thereby ably transporting readers into the setting of this particular sexual subculture." - CHOICE

"Price-Glynn contrasts the aspirations of the strippers with the clubs design, rules, expectations, and practices, all of which served to exploit their labor. She argues that without listening to sex workers and addressing their abuse and lack of power, feminists will never take the real battlethe one against structural oppressionto the ring." - Ms. Magazine