Strip Culture

Not long ago, I was in a low-end strip club in Washington, DC with an anthropologist friend of mine. It was there, in this club which still resembled the Chinese restaurant it had once been, that we started thinking about the operations of desire and the flows of power we saw condensed before our eyes. For we immediately grasped that the dynamics which we were participating in and observing were not only replays of the class- and gender-hierarchized culture just outside the red-curtained door, but that the dynamics here were in fact intensely magnified, to the point that, instead of becoming unbearable, they had become strangely tolerable, enticing even.

You see, we entered the club half-expecting a kind of utopic space to appear magically, offering us momentary reprieve from the operations of “surplus repression,” Marcuse's famous term for the unhappy regulation of sexuality under advanced capitalism. Well, we didn't—or couldn't—find any such relief; instead, the very liberation of sexuality the club promises, and no doubt partially delivers, actually produced in us states of submissiveness and acquiescence that we perversely found more satisfying.

There were questions now: How does a strip club activate, or reactivate, one's masochism? Where to look for the origin and nature of this pleasure in submissiveness? What are the contact points between a psychoanalysis of perversion and a cultural analysis of this erotic scene?

For sure, sexuality in a strip club seems less repressed. Sexual banter, unabashed naked bodies, the free exchange of money and compliments, and open seductions all seem to work at lifting prohibitions on sexuality. But, as Foucault reminds us, signs of sexuality's liberation point directly to the reaffirmation of the very structures that liberation and transgression would undo. If strip clubs are spaces for the possibility of a sexual existence unencumbered by sexual repression, they are so only to the extent that such an existence has been created