This paper problematizes the concept of `true' intimacy by examining a particular commodified relationship - that between a female dancer and her regular male customers in a heterosexual strip club in the US. Participant observation is used to describe and examine the relationships developed between dancers and their `regular customers' and the mutual manufacture of identities and intimacy which is involved in these relationships. First, it is argued that an illusion of intimacy is produced within the strip club to make an interaction between a dancer and her regular seem more `real' and desirable. Next, it is shown how even such a commodified relationship can generate a high degree of emotional involvement, using the concept of `emotional labor' (Hochschild, 1983) to help break down the barriers between real and manufactured intimacy. Finally, there is a discussion on how an intimate experience draws upon private self-representations that are both real and imaginary, and upon sexual self-identities that are ideologically informed, in an attempt to show how interpersonal intimate relationships are structured within a fantasy-reality which complicates utilitarian notions of emotional engagement.

This article explores customers' understandings of their visits to heterosexual strip clubs and the ways in which those visits become meaningful to them in relation to cultural discourses around masculinity, sexuality, leisure, and consumption, as well as in relation to their everyday lives and relationships. Not every man finds strip clubs pleasurable, yet understanding why some men frequent these venues can inform us more generally about the links between sexuality, gender, and the marketplace. This article focuses on regular male customers' stated motives for visiting strip clubs and examines those visits as touristic and masculinizing practices. It also explores gender, sexuality, and power in the men s performances of desire in the clubs, taking up issues of visibility, virility, youthfulness, and commodification.

This piece is a short story based on the author’s fieldwork in contemporary U.S. strip clubs. The story revolves around an ongoing relationship between an exotic dancer and a married customer—a relationship that only exists inside the club and that is based on the mutual construction of fantasy. It is followed by a brief discussion of the use of fiction in experimental ethnography and of the author’s own motivations for and experiences in writing short fiction.

This article provides a narrative overview of research on HIV/STI risk and collective sexual behavior based on an inclusive analysis of research on environments where people gather for sexual activity-sex clubs, swingers' clubs, bathhouses, parks, private sex parties, etc. The aim is to analyze how collective sex has been approached across disciplines to promote conversation across paradigms and suggest new lines of inquiry. Attention to context-such as the location of sex-was a necessary redress to universalizing models of sexual risk-taking behavior, leading to insights rooted in the particularities of each environment and its users. However, the identification of ever more precise risk groups or environmental idiosyncrasies eventually becomes theoretically restrictive, leading to an overestimation of the uniqueness of sexual enclaves, and of the difference between any given enclave and the broader social milieu. Using a theoretical framework of transgression to interpret the interdisciplinary literature, similarities in the spatial and social organization of collective sex environments are identified. Insights generated from this complementary perspective are then applied to understandings of collective sex: first, the example of male-female (MF) "swingers" is used to illustrate the need to establish, rather than assume, the distinctiveness of each non-normative sexual enclave, and to broaden the conceptualization of context; second, questions are raised about the practicality of interventions in collective sex environments. Finally, new lines of intellectual inquiry are suggested to shed light not just on collective sex but on sociosexual issues more generally, such as increasing protective sexual health behavior or negotiating consent in sexual encounters.

This article explores two interrelated issues in the exotic dance literature: (1) claims that research on strip clubs is virgin, unstudied territory, and not taken seriously, and (2) the unrelenting focus on negotiations of power between men and women in the clubs. It argues that the study of commercial sexand here specifically of exotic dance -is itself culturally informed. Thus, there has been a great deal of studying in strip clubs, but less exploration of the ways that these venues, and those of us who study them, are implicated in larger social, cultural, political, economic, and intimate relationships, processes, and patterns of meaning. A cultural approach to the study of strip clubs (Agustín, 2005) opens our investigation of these important sites of sexual-economic exchange in theoretically innovative and timely ways.