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“Work That Body” Precarity and Femininity in the New Economy Louise Owen

In a parodic short film made in 2010 for the American comedy website Funny or Die, actress Christina Applegate appears in the role of fitness instructor Roxy Fedaro. To the strains of Christina Aguilera’s 2002 song “Dirrty,” the perky Applegate addresses her audience from the sprung floor of a gym studio, rolling gum in her cheek. “Hey. I’m Roxy Fedaro. And I’m here to show you how you can be seductive, and confident, with my new DVD...” (Palmigiano 2010).1 As the camera pulls back, revealing that she and the two other women in the studio have engorged pregnant stomachs, Fedaro unveils the DVD’s title: “...Pre-Natal Pole Dancing!” (PNPD). Around two minutes in length, PNPD pastiches the “direct response” genre of TV commercial — that is, a “promotional method in which a prospective customer is urged to respond immediately and directly to the advertiser” (BusinessDictionary.com 2012). A real-world ad for a weight-loss exotic and club dance DVD produced by Flirty Girl Fitness illustrates the genre’s c­ onventions: third party testimonial (“I’ve never had this much success with any other thing that I’ve tried”),

  1. All quotations from the Funny or Die sketch in this essay are taken from the online video (Palmigiano 2010).

Figure 1. The trailer for the Pole Dancing School’s new downloadable lessons with founder and former ballet dancer Elena Gibson, clad in a black tutu. (Courtesy of Elena Gibson, www.poledancingschool.com)

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TDR: The Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012. ©2012 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

product demonstration (pole dance, chair dance, “booty beat” r­ outines), citation of results (“you’ll lose up to two pant sizes!”) and a call to action ($19.99: Amex, Visa, Mastercard) (Flirtygirlfitness 2009).2 Attentively observing this advertorial f­ ormat and its injunction to “­self-help,” the sketch makes lavish use of satirical speech and physical grotesquerie. Applegate’s PNPD fitness instructor character (five months pregnant) c­ onfides: “Many ­pregnant women experience these things called ‘hormones’ and because you’re a total fat-ass, you don’t feel sexy anymore. But that’s why you need something I like to call ‘Seducidence’! That’s seductive confidence put together.” The two pregnant workshop participants, Meeghan R. ( Jessalyn Gilsig) and Lonnie R. (Wendi McLendon-Covey) — actors familiar from their roles in Glee (2009– 11) and Bridesmaids (2011)3 — laboriously haul themselves up and down their poles, swivel their hips, and roll around on the ground. While executing a “backslide” (a slow descent to the floor with the back leaning straight against the pole, knees gradually opening), Fedaro lets out a resonant fart: “It happens. He’ll understand.” As she grinds against the pole, her voiceover declares breathily: “I can’t see my fuckin’ lady parts anymore. But I can still show you how I work ’em... Call now!” Notwithstanding its 1.9 million views on Funny or Die, PNPD isn’t completely s­ uccessful as a piece of comedy. Its satire can be somewhat heavy-handed, the call, for example, for participants to “work that FETUS!” offering an unsubtle spin on Diana Ross’s aerobics-themed hit “Work That Body” (1981). Yet the sketch does point quite brilliantly to a critical p ­ roblem: the relationship of women and their bodies to “post-feminist” cultural practices, and the intersection of both with precarity. In common with the real-world proprietors of r­ ecreational or fitness pole-dancing schools, Applegate’s character is an entrepreneur, a “self-­making” woman who has spotted a gap in a market — or, better, is seeking to create a market where none existed before. If the audience for fitness DVDs of this sort ordinarily consists of women in search of “a sexy, slender, awesome body but without having to do another boring, tedious w ­ orkout again” (Flirtygirlfitness 2009) this sketch lightly signals the political stakes of re-positioning exotic dance as a fitness practice. Rather than lampooning “empowerment” or “fun,” its comedy gestures towards the role of women in patriarchy. “Pre-natal pole dancing works, because when men see pregnant women, they know she’s down for sex,” insists Fedaro. “Meeghan R., Mother of Four” offers: “I can use these pole-dancing moves anywhere. I mean, anywhere there’s music you could start dancing, right? And a lot of men seem to like it, which is good. Because I actually don’t know who the father of my baby is...” In connecting the use of dance moves as enticement with the burden of single motherhood, the sketch comically implies that economic support is a social good provided by men in exchange for (the promise of) sex with women. Parodying a consumerist culture that posits

  2. I found this video via the feminist blog Rage Against the Man-chine (Nine Deuce 2010).   3. In Glee and Bridesmaids, both actors play characters associated with motherhood — the one, Terri, a wife pretending to be pregnant in order to secure her relationship with her husband, a house, and upscale homeware; the other, Rita, a beleaguered housewife with a husband and three sons. In January 2012, the top comment on PNPD on YouTube was: “I see Terri is faking another pregnancy.” These intertextual connections, as well as Applegate’s relationship with the Pussycat Dolls, the burlesque troupe turned pop group with whom she performed in 1996, make this text a particularly interesting response to the post-feminist discursive environment.

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Louise Owen is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research examines contemporary theatre and performance in terms of economic change and modes of governance. Her writing has been published in Performance Research, frakcija, Contemporary Theatre Review, and RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. Forthcoming essays explore site-specific performance, and alternative and community theatre in London since 1972; a monograph in process explores cultural work and neoliberalization in Britain. She currently co-convenes the London Theatre Seminar (UK). [email protected]

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raunch as liberation (see Levy 2005:7–45), the skit spoofs the notion that sexual activity within a highly constrained set of aesthetic parameters is a must for women, pregnant or not. And, in choosing pregnant women in their late 30s and early 40s as protagonists, it comments on the fetishization of youth and freedom in contemporary capitalism in the West, which is intimately related to its reproductive politics. Young women, Anita Harris notes, are now considered “most useful when they are child-free. New discourses of desire that unstitch sexual activity from reproduction are therefore of increasing value in the new economy” — a context producing the conditions for a “market of preventative or punitive measures to thwart teen motherhood” (2005:40, 41; see also McRobbie 2009:85–86). Fitness pole dancing is exemplary of such discursive “unstitching.” It is an industry built upon entrepreneurial work by people (for the most part women) who have set up opportunities for other people (for the most part women) to participate in during their leisure time. The exceptionally popular and internationally federated practice of pole dancing now has several governing organizations, numerous university societies, and a magazine. Repeated demands have been made for its inclusion in the Olympics (Associated Press 2010; Guardian .co.uk 2011). Competitive events held around the world offer platforms for public performances, which, along with instructional clips and pole dance “fails,” are extensively documented online. Performances by figures like Jenyne Butterfly demonstrate the exceptional acrobatic skill and athleticism required for expert practice. In London and the surrounding area there are currently more than 20 organizations offering fitness pole-dance training, which range from larger, established schools, to smaller entrepreneurial start-ups, to franchises operating nationwide, to freelancers teaching in gyms or adapted locations. At around £25 per session, prices are well above the UK average for a fitness class (group exercise sessions cost around £8).4 Choreographically, pole dancing draws sustenance from circus, aerial performance, and burlesque, but is most conspicuously an adaptation of exotic dance performance, largely practiced in the strip club, a scene of labor that (as I discuss later) is itself notoriously precarious. There is substantial if uneven exchange between the cultures surrounding fitness pole dancing and the somewhat more mainstreamed neoburlesque, with courses and classes in the art of the tease frequently offered alongside pole dancing, and both marketed as (no longer particularly ironic) “hen do” (bachelorette) activities. These are not promoted as tools to snare and keep a man, but as empowering, as a means of building individual confidence through the realization of (sexual) expressiveness. Scholars — some of whom are sympathetic to the sex-positive position — thus read fitness pole dancing as symptomatic of a contemporary “post-feminist” environment, in which tropes and ways of looking associated with striptease and pornography have penetrated more mainstream representational practices (see Holland 2009, 2010; Holland and Attwood 2009; Melamed 2010; Donaghue et al. 2011; Whitehead and Kurz 2009).

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In contrast to sex-positive arguments regarding fitness pole dancing’s ambiguously liberating qualities, and, at the other extreme, to moralizing readings of pole dancing as an inevitable gateway to prostitution (Walter 2010:51–53), I explore the decade-long expansion of fitness pole dancing as a consumer activity in relation to “institutionalized systems of domination” integral to capitalism (Glick 2000:31). The practice is thereby located in the context of the “resurgent patriarchy” (McRobbie 2009:85) of neoliberal capitalism: “a political economy that is, at one and the same time, a sexual economy” (Hubbard 2004:666). In this economy, the “freedom” trumpeted as post-feminism’s key value has obscured the continued purchase of older constructions of “women’s work” and “precarity” that critically relate to service, and logically underpin fitness pole dancing itself.

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  4. This figure is an average calculated on the basis of a search of local public leisure center websites in July 2012. See Holland (2009:40–41) for a fascinating account of women’s attitudes to the relatively high cost of pole fitness classes.

Female Subjectivity and the “Sexual Contract” In The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2009), Angela McRobbie offers a bleak diagnosis of contemporary feminism: cultural practices and texts have systematically functioned to “disarticulate” feminism as a coherent political movement while simultaneously taking some of its demands “into account,” thus seemingly invalidating the need for any further political action (2009:9, 12, 14–15). Symptomatic of such cultural practice is a famous ad from 1998 for Citroën Xsara, featuring Claudia Schiffer’s knowing performance of a burlesque striptease. Having wriggled out of her golden evening dress en route from her 18th-century country house to the car, Schiffer drops the last piece of her underwear out of the car’s window onto the gravel driveway, and purrs: “Why wear anything else?” (2007). McRobbie offers this gloss: This advert appears to suggest that, yes, this is a self-consciously sexist ad. Feminist critiques of it are deliberately evoked. Feminism is taken into account, but only to be shown to be no longer necessary. Why? Because it now seems that there is no exploitation here, there is nothing remotely naïve about this striptease. She seems to be doing it out of choice, and for her own enjoyment. The image works on the basis of its audience knowing Claudia Schiffer to be one of the world’s most famous and highly paid supermodels. Once again the shadow of disapproval is evoked (the striptease as site of female exploitation) only instantly to be dismissed as belonging to the past, to a time when feminists used to object to such imagery. To make such an objection nowadays would run the risk of ridicule. Objection is pre-empted with irony. In each of these cases a spectre of feminism is invoked so that it might be undone. (2009:17)

The contemporary discourse of “precarity” has a close historical and institutional relationship to this form of dispersed, invisible patriarchy. As Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter show, precarity has been most frequently deployed “as a political-analytic concept and mobilizing

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In response to the airing of this ad on British television in 1999, 121 people lodged official complaints with the Independent Television Commission regarding its “sexism,” “gratuity,” and “offensive and degrading” message, none of which were upheld (Ofcom 2012). Similar complaints do not seem to have been registered in response to a 2009 ad in the “Modern Times” series for the Renault Twingo. This particular example subverts a middle-class mother’s anticipated disapproval of her daughter’s advertised performance as “Lola” in a risqué (but tasteful) burlesque cabaret. Catching sight of a poster through the car window, with first a frown, and then a smile, the mother ejaculates: “What?! You found a job, and you didn’t tell me?” (2009) — a dramatization that maps so directly onto contemporary ideology (the apparently inevitable abandonment of the second wave feminist project by a woman of its generation, valorization of economic productivity above all else) that it could almost be parodic. In each case, the frisson of the scene and spectacle of striptease, a pleasurable acceptance of the (male) gaze, and a post-feminist emphasis on agency, aspiration, and consumerism interact for a revisionist effect. The twin of McRobbie’s “spectre of feminism” is, after all, the “spectre of patriarchy,” which, by rigorously individualizing their protagonists, such texts seek to repress (see Gill 2007:72; Glick 2000:30–32; Power 2009:27–38). For McRobbie, a Deleuzian concept of “luminosity” best articulates the spectacular and depoliticized public visibility young women are permitted to assume, now only “able to come forward on condition that feminism fades away” (2009:54, 56). The acceptable aesthetic contours of women’s public appearance are those of traditional femininity but in the ironic mode of the “post-feminist masquerade” that “openly acknowledges and celebrates the fictive status of femininity while at the same time establishing new ways of enforcing sexual difference” (64). The conditions of possibility for political action in this irony-saturated discursive environment are alarmingly obscured: “the young woman in contemporary political and popular culture is asked to reconcile autonomy and the possibility of achievement with compliancy with a patriarchal order which is dissolved, decentralised, and nowhere to be seen” (122).

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device within predominantly European-based social movements responding to the erosion of the welfare state” (2008:55) — in other words, as a shorthand for neoliberalization and resistance to the increasing incidence of precarious labor. Cristina Morini calls this the “feminization of the work process,” going so far as to say that “it can be maintained that the figure of social precariousness today is woman” (2007:41, 43). Morini’s “degendering of work” refers to a situation in which all waged labor gradually acquires (and demands) the characteristics commonly attributed to “women’s work” (44). Home and the workplace alike become domains of labor, “free” time is eroded, and a “cultural attitude” of caring is privileged (47). But, as she only briefly implies, the reconstitution of work along “feminized” lines, which blurs the boundaries between “work” and “life outside of work,” makes it “even more difficult [for women] to manage both their private and public selves” (52). McRobbie argues rather more forcefully that scholarship elaborating on “feminization of work” and cognate conceptual categories (“immaterial labor,” “post-Fordism,” and so on) exhibits a kind of “gender-blindness” to material experiences, in effect “relegat[ing] questions of gender and race to the realm of the less than abstract” (2011:62). In this respect, Judith Butler’s treatment of precarity in terms of the discursive construction of “­precarious life” — people who fall outside of the purview of the protections of the social — ­enlarges the scope of a feminist response; “precarious life” encompasses “lives who do not qualify as ­recognizable, readable, or grievable. And in this way, precarity is a rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless” (2009:xiii). Butler’s attention to “a collectivity that does not presuppose sameness” (2009:x) seems a departure from her earlier insistence that, despite its utilities, “the feminist ‘we’ is always and only a phantasmatic construction” ([1990] 1999:181); it is at still further distance from a socalled third-wave feminist resistance to “understanding gender in collective terms” (Budgeon 2011:282) and associated principles regarding “the right to self-expression, regardless of its form or substance” (289). An historical view reveals the contingency of these principles, and their implication in the long history of capitalism’s emergence, in which differences of gender, “race,” and sexuality have been systematically asserted as the basis for “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2010:249). Carole Pateman’s important text The Sexual Contract (1988) theorizes the social contract imagined in the 17th and 18th century writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau as predicated on a political concept that she calls (after Adrienne Rich) “the law of male sex-right” (1988:2). In the incipient liberal capitalist formation of “civil society,” only men may enjoy the freedom to associate socially and economically in the public sphere. Women are naturally subject to the governance of men, for the reason that “only masculine beings are endowed with the attributes and capacities necessary to enter into contracts, the most important of which is ownership of property in the person; only men, that is to say, are ‘individuals’” (Pateman 1988:6). Alongside “ownership of property in the person” — a concept to which I shall return in relation to the empowerment putatively on offer via participation in fitness pole dancing — the “attributes and capacities” in question are intellectual and emotional, and, Pateman argues, imagined as functional to women’s childbearing capacity. “The body of the ‘individual,’” she notes,

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is very different from women’s bodies. His body is tightly enclosed within boundaries, but women’s bodies are permeable, their contours change shape and they are subject cyclical processes. All these differences are summed up in the natural bodily process of birth. Physical birth symbolizes everything that makes women incapable of entering the original contract and transforming themselves into civil individuals who uphold its terms. (96)

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Women, whom Rousseau posits as subject to “unlimited desires” and unable to exercise rational thought and control, are possessed of “weakening, subversive influence” inimical to the ordering of civil society. Their “proper” domain is the private sphere, subject to the governance of the male “head of the household.” Otherwise socially vulnerable, once a woman assumes the role of “wife,” she “obtains her means of support (‘protection’) from her husband, and also the means

to perform her tasks” (in Pateman 1988:97, 99, 37, 129). The hypothetical “sexual contract” that Pateman sees embedded in these writings thus insists, in her words, that “sexual difference is political difference; sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection” (6). Silvia Federici’s work demonstrates that the contract theorists’ arguments followed hard upon the efforts of states and elites to assert violent control over the very reproductive capacities that supposedly disqualified women from participation in the public sphere. In the 16th and 17th centuries, contraception was criminalized and the role of midwife, a traditionally female occupation, was wrested from women (2004:88–89). The “campaign of terror” of the 16th- and 17th-century witch-hunts in Europe, whose main target was poor women, and whose project was in part to punish reproductive crimes (birth control, abortion, infanticide), produced, she argues, the following effects: “Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus ‘liberated’ from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor” (Federici 2004:102, 184). Federici theorizes these actions as biopolitical, directed toward population growth in the interests of capitalist expansion (181). While men struggled against the imposition of the new form of “waged labor,” both domestic and nondomestic forms of work carried out by women were reimagined as a kind of “commons”: “a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations” (97). “Unproductive” sexuality, including what was to be categorized, much later, as homosexuality, “which in several parts of Europe was still fully accepted during the Renaissance,” was demonized, and “masculine” and “feminine” identity positions that supported heteronormative reproduction elaborated (197). With the development of this new patriarchal formation — which Federici dubs “the patriarchy of the wage” (97) — the notion that “what being a woman (wife) means is to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband)” (Pateman 1988:128) was enshrined in common law (Dickenson 1997:83). The law of coverture, predicated on “the doctrine of marital unity,” was pivotal to “the continued decline in women’s economic fortunes at the high tide of liberalism” in the 19th century (Dickenson 1997:89, 85). The role of state-sanctioned violence in sustaining these relations between men and women is exemplified by the category of “conjugal rights” — the right of husbands to have sex with their wives at will — which effectively made rape within marriage a legal impossibility, with legislative change enacted in Britain only as recently as 1991 (Faludi 1992:8; see also Pateman 1988:123–24). “Just as today,” Federici argues, “by repressing women, the ruling classes more effectively repressed the entire proletariat” (2004:189). In her own work, 20 years after Pateman’s, McRobbie refunctions the term sexual contract to advance her argument about the incorporation of women into 21st-century political and economic arrangements. For McRobbie, “sexual contract” signifies “a convergence of attentions” alighting upon female bodies and their activities (2009:89). “In this contract,” she writes, “economic activity is foregrounded and politics reduced to the margins of significance in favour of the seeming attractions of consumer citizenship” (89). This argument is compelling, but specific insights regarding older constructions of domination, subordination, and the repressive relegation of women to the domestic (private) sphere assist in thinking further about neoliberalization and the concomitant “reinscription of a virile masculinity, the authority of which was seriously undermined in the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s (with the disappearance of a once familiar division of labour organised around the labouring male body and a procreative female body)” (Hubbard 2004:682–83). The meteoric expansion of fitness pole dancing embodies the notion that “in the history of capitalism, ‘going back’ was a means of stepping forward, from the viewpoint of establishing the conditions for capital accumulation” (Federici 2004:203). Far from being outmoded, gendered oppressions are taking novel forms of appearance. Work That Body 83

“Carcraig Won’t Give Up Her Day Job” Fitness Pole Dancing, Work, and Leisure In the UK, the exotic dance sector — increasingly dominated by large, corporate “gentlemen’s clubs” providing “female theatrical entertainment involving nudity,” as a notice inside Spearmint Rhino on Tottenham Court Road in London puts it — represents a particularly extreme scene of precarious labor conditions: large sums of money might be earned, but “self-employed” dancers are also required to pay clubs a house fee in order to work, an often substantial percentage of their income from dances, and are subject to fines for infringements of club rules r­ egarding appearance and conduct (Sanders and Hardy 2011). Earning potential in this highly volatile, competitive, and inhospitable economic environment is predicated on the successful theatricalization of intimacy and femininity for the male consumer (Mavin and Grady 2011:9–11). Meanwhile, providers of fitness pole dancing take steps to distance themselves from association with commercial strip- and lap-dancing clubs.5 One pole-dance fitness provider, Vertical Dance, actively seeks “to remove the stigma attached to pole dance, bringing the art form into the mainstream arena, providing top class group fitness teaching in a fun and friendly environment” (Vertical Dance 2012), while another, Pole Secrets, highlights various health benefits: “in addition to boosting confidence and improving all over body tone Pole Dancing classes also increase flexibility and reduces the risk of osteoporosis” (Pole Secrets 2012). Nonetheless, ubiquitous recommendations of the use of high heeled shoes in the workshop situation, performance of sexualized movement and gesture, and representations of curvaceous female figures in silhouette or clad in heels and hotpants on promotional materials make for a contradictory scene in which claims regarding fitness, sensuality, and artistic legitimacy compete. In an interview extra in The Art of Pole Dancing (2006), Pole People’s home fitness DVD, instructor Erin Polaschek muses that participants “do it because they want to feel sexy, break free, build their confidence a little bit; they do it because it’s physical, it’s fitness, it’s dancing [...] it’s not restricted to strip clubs any more, in fact it’s becoming very much performance art.” For Polaschek, this turn in culture even represents a form of freedom of speech: “Instead of living in a taboo world where we don’t talk about these things, we’re now starting to embrace things like pole dancing” (Pole People 2006). Negotiating mutually contradictory discourses with agility, Polaschek’s use of words and phrases like “taboo” and “break free” in juxtaposition to the illicit scene of the strip club corroborates Barbara Brents and Teela Sanders’s suggestion that “social ambivalence fuels transgression and marginalization of the [adult entertainment] industry which in fact assists the mainstreaming process” (2010:41). A widespread discursive strategy in this regard, too, is irony, the use of which “reinforces the idea that pole dancing, in this context and by these women, involves a parody of ‘real’ pole dancing in strip clubs” (Donaghue et al. 2011:453).

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The emergence of fitness pole dancing is an indication not just of “the wider sexualization of the high street” (Holland and Attwood 2009:166) and the proliferation of new forms of “erotic retailing” targeted at women (Kent and Berman Brown 2006:199–211). Nor is it only a consequence of the widespread revival of burlesque cabaret. In the UK, the spread of this mode of performance does not merely cite exotic dance, but is historically coincident with, and arguably contingent upon, the material expansion of lap- and table-dancing clubs on the North American model. From the mid-1990s onward, chains such as For Your Eyes Only (FYEO) and Spearmint Rhino began to expand in London, with many new adult entertainment businesses following suit (Hubbard 2009:724). So great was the growth of adult entertainment nationally that, by 2003, one insider could remark, “soon it will be easier to name the places in the UK that don’t

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  5. As Phil Hubbard remarks of striptease in Britain, the history of the transnational form of pole dancing “remains largely unwritten” (2009:723). While some cite the circus as origin (Shteir 2006:272), a point of consensus seems to be that pole dancing in its contemporary form was first practiced in Canadian strip clubs in the late 1970s and taken up thereafter in the US, the UK, and Europe (Ross and Greenwell 2005:138; Holland and Attwood 2009:165).

have strip bars” (Tyke 2003a). In Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment (2010), Samantha Holland quotes Jennifer, a former ballet dancer–turned–professional pole dance teacher from Australia who, living in London and working for British Airways in 2000, took a six-week class “‘at a strip club in Mayfair [...with] like one pole and like pretty girls, and it was part pole, part lap dancing which didn’t interest me at all’” (2010:65). FYEO’s table and pole dancing school, also run at a venue in Mayfair, was reviewed by a Metro journalist in March 2003 as “one of the first schools in the country” (Dando 2003). And in March 2003, London Strip Scene Gossip published news of a course in Birmingham offered by Legs 11 lap-dancing club: “as far as I know the first provincial alternative to the FYEO and Jo King courses in London” (Tyke 2003b).6 While the clubs’ attempts to meet their specific labor force training needs seem to have coincided with, and even pre-dated offerings catering to, and stimulating, the resurgence of interest in burlesque, training continues to be staged by corporate gentlemen’s clubs. The club chain Secrets advertises its current course with a rhetoric of sensuality and confidence-building similar in kind to that used by pole fitness providers, but with a professionalizing incentive built into its pitch: “Ladies Spice Up Your Life or Increase Your Income!” (Secrets 2012). And, the widespread availability of fitness pole-dance training now also influences working practices at lapdancing clubs in other ways. As a professional lap dancer told interviewers, describing the utility of pole dancing as a technique for attracting customers: You’ve got to really try to connect with the customers when you’re onstage. I just enjoy it — I love being onstage anyway, I love pole for fitness, so it’s obviously a good way for me to just express myself when I’m up there. [...] Pole fitness is really bringing itself into the club, it’s good when you can be impressive onstage. (Lapdancingproject 2011) Clearly, however, the recreational pole-dancing class involves a different kind of transaction between and articulation of the “service provider” and “consumer” than the strip club. One party is providing a paid-for teaching service. The other is making use of her leisure-time to acquire or experiment with a performance skill for fitness and pleasure, whether in a systematic way or as a one-off event. Consider the review by “carcraig” for Ciao!, an online price comparison and consumer forum, of a recreational pole-dancing class in Edinburgh organized to celebrate her sister’s hen do, offered by national dance party provider Pink Kiss: There were two poles on the small dance floor, which was surrounded by mirrors so we were perfectly aware at all times how ridiculous we looked. Our instructor for the day was friendly and very enthusiastic (especially considering this was three o’clock in the afternoon and she had been working until 5am the previous morning.) She introduced herself, we signed our Disclaimer Forms (!) and fetched some drinks from the bar, and then she led us through a short warm-up routine. We had been advised prior to the lesson to wear pumps or trainers for the warm-up and cool-down and heels for the lesson along with our shorts and vest-tops or t-shirts. Our instructor, wearing the most amazing ­vertigo-inducing wedge platforms which I’m sure I couldn’t even have walked in, began by demonstrating the routine that she intended to teach us. “Aye, right” we muttered as she swung herself elegantly and sexily round the pole upside down. (Carcraig 2008) The teacher’s expert performance and “vertigo-inducing” shoes demonstrate the extent to which this, an excessive-become-normative form of femininity, requires practice to maintain. If someone is performing skilled labor, it is definitely not the hens; indeed, the reviewer ­continues: “I have a new found respect for Pole Dancers — it’s really tricky and very hard work”

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  6. Striptease artist Jo King set up the London School of Striptease, the course to which Tyke refers, in 2000, identifying it as “the very first school of its kind in Europe” (London School of Striptease 2012). King has also since worked as a choreographer for theatres, festivals, solo burlesque artists, television production companies, and high-end erotic retailers.

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(Carcraig 2008). However, “carcraig won’t give up her day job,” the title of her review, nonetheless imposes rhetorical distance between herself and the “real” pole dancers for whom she has “new found respect.” This claim to ineptitude — both in the doing of gender, and the performance of the dance —  arguably represents a sort of control exercised by the speaking subject regarding her own ambivalent relation to (professional) hyperfemininity. In their insightful ethnographic study of the “talk” of participants in pole-dancing classes, Kally Whitehead and Tim Kurz likewise discover a strong emphasis on “choice and control” (2009:239). In their interviewees’ speech, the female subject is constructed as empowered through her access to control and choice as to when she positions herself as the erotic object. Unlike the professional pole dancer who must dance for her patron because she has been “bought” as a sexual item, the recreational pole dancer is constructed as having choice and control because of being the consumer in the exchange (rather than service provider) and the discursive redefinition of the male gaze of “loved ones” as “appreciative” rather than objectifying. (Whitehead and Kurz 2009:240) The concepts of empowerment and self-ownership that loom large in these reflections mediate and assert a concept of “property in the person.” Empowerment in the sense described in the passage above is predicated on the earning power forcibly denied women in earlier historical moments (that persists in the present-day pay gap) and the capacity to spend the resulting disposable income freely. The interviewees’ refusal of a substantive connection between performances taking place in strip clubs and fitness workshops — and subsequently, it is implied here, night clubs in which poles are installed, and homes for which portable poles may be purchased — is based on a presumed difference in their economic constitution, not on the form or style of movement. In other words, the consumer is imagined as a figure of sovereignty. Julia O’Connell Davidson’s materialist understanding of “liberal discourse on property, labor, and contractual consent as fictions concealing class power” (2002:94) challenges this ideology. As she writes:

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In capitalist liberal democracies, formal rights of equal participation in the process of commodity exchange are interpreted as a form of freedom for capitalist and worker alike, even though it is through this very process of exchange that the political and economic dominance of the capitalist class is maintained and reproduced. The beauty of the concept of property in the person, then, is that it conceals the relations of power and dependence that exist between those who pay others to do their will, and those who get paid to surrender their own will and do someone else’s bidding. (2002:86)

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O’Connell Davidson’s critique — part of a discussion of prostitution and the peculiarity of “the vexed relationship between sex and selfhood” (87) — accords with Pateman’s in pointing towards domination and subordination as necessary aspects of the wage-labor exchange enacted by “free agents.” Whitehead and Kurz’s interviewees see the strip club as such a scene of “power and dependence,” but think that these relations are limited to the scene of work “as such.” Debi Sundahl (stage name Fanny Fatale) articulates a similar position regarding the professional role of the stripper and cultural constructions circulating beyond the workplace: “to any enlightened observer, our very existence provides a distinction and choice as to when a woman should be treated like a sex object, and when she should not be. At the theatre, yes; on the street, no” (1987, in Liepe-Levinson 2002:125). For Nina Power, this shared discourse of objectification is now utterly anachronistic. If fitness pole dancing promises to endow the trainee with “body confidence,” this represents one more step towards the “becoming-CV of the human” (Power 2009:25). With the interpenetration of “work” and “life,” “the personal is no longer just political, it’s economic through and through” (26).

Opportunities to participate in fitness pole dancing in “safe environment[s]” for performance — a safety based, according to the narrative above, on a “secure” distinction between the categories of the “real” and the “theatrical” — have multiplied (Sundahl 1987, in Liepe-Levinson 2002:125). The bigger fitness and recreational pole-dancing schools in Britain were founded in 2003, roughly coinciding with the moment at which Canadian entrepreneurs Christine Boyer and Tracy Gray launched their pole fitness company Aradia, which they developed on the basis of first watching pole dancers in a Vancouver bar. Learning how to pole dance independently on the basis of their observations — “We watched the strippers, practised every day, and it was really hard” — they finally offered beginners’ courses themselves in gyms (in Holloway 2006). Aradia is now a franchise operation with 18 schools across Canada and the US (Aradia Fitness 2012). Positioning such entrepreneurial initiatives as a sort of vanguardist feminism, Holland writes of her research: while talking to polers there were occasions when I realised that I was thinking about the way in which self-professed Riot Grrls talked about their zines, bands and approach to both modern feminism and life in general. There were very similar feelings of being on the frontiers of something new, something female-focused and/or feminist, something which had the potential to give pleasure, or, ideally, even to enhance lives — and all that with an undertow of defiance and independence. Pole classes have never been in the hands of any sort of dance or fitness “establishment” but have always been initiated and run by women driven by a belief in pole’s potential; pole is not owned by companies such as Nike or Fitness First, nor is there even a particular person or group credited with being the leader or one true initiator. (2010:63) The implication is that pole dancing’s distance from big multinational fitness brands makes it somehow a women’s grassroots activity. But on second look, large corporations do offer pole dancing, but by enabling providers to rent space in their gym outlets: Pole People stages classes at branches of Fitness First and LA Fitness (as well as at Sadlers Wells and the Actors Centre); Pole Secrets, at branches of Fitness First, LA Fitness, and Virgin Active. Teachers are freelance workers who may be juggling a variety of different trades. In 2010, Polestars advertised this as a particular virtue in biographical interviews with its teachers on its website. Responses to the question “Different day job?” showed an extraordinary range of occupations: cosmetic surgery clinic theatre manager; fitness instructor; office worker; operations manager; paralegal; actress, singer, pianist, and voice coach; theatre festival producer; personal trainer; document controller; PA; belly dancer and journalist; retail manager; choreographer; receptionist. One revealed that she pursued “Lots of different little things, I’m trying to be entrepreneurial, I’ll try to think of inventive creative ways of making money and then, try them out. I also work in a crèche part time and teach kids’ dance classes too” (Polestars 2010).7 Polestars’ current recruitment notice boasts that the company offers “very competitive rates of pay as almost all of our parties take place on Saturday afternoon. Therefore we would need you to be available on most weekends. If you are a working dancer/actress or in fact any other discipline, we are happy for you to take time off for shows/jobs as long as you can manage and communicate this to us in a timely and professional way.” Alongside opportunities to teach, Pole Passion now also offers franchising opportunities: “with only a small monthly investment of just £15 per week, (the cost of one student) our licence owners are able to generate an attractive income from a part time commitment, so you can run a Pole Passion Fitness license alongside an existing job or other daytime commitments and get paid and get fit at the same time.” And, alongside its classes, Pole People runs The Peacock, a bar in Clapham Junction (a gentrified area of south London) that stages “live Burlesque and Cabaret performances with retro 80’s/90’s DJs to create awesome parties Work That Body

  7. As of March 2012, these biographies were no longer available on the site.

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every Friday and Saturday night” (Pole People 2012a), enabling participants to immerse themselves in neoburlesque culture. The company also advertises to potential venues — “upmarket style bars, restaurants, fitness centres and dance studios” (Pole People 2012b) — to host classes “typically for young professional women 18–40 (lawyers, media, creative, banking etc.) who are wanting to pole dance for fitness and fun. [...] For bar and restaurant venues our classes will bring you an upmarket client base who stay after the class for drinks” (Pole People 2012b). What emerges is a sense of an industry in steady expansion, inserting itself into existing economies, with training performed by precarious, female, freelance workers. And, far from constituting grassroots, “anti-establishment” initiatives, these operations mime the logic and business models of multinational capitalist enterprise. (Auto)biographical narratives on company websites serve to reposition pole dancing as a primarily aesthetic or sporting phenomenon, or a strategy for self-improvement — the rhetoric of self-transformation of course being a critical ideological component of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Pole Dancing School’s particular offer, for example, brings pole dancing into relation with classical dance:

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Pole Dancing School was founded by Elena Gibson with a mission to deliver world class tuition at affordable prices to anyone, from beginner to professional, wanting to learn pole dancing. Elena trained as a classical ballerina and discovered pole dancing as a way

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Figure 2. Elena Gibson performing a series of precise and highly athletic tricks on the pole to an electropop tune in the promotional trailer for her school’s downloadable lessons. (Courtesy of Elena Gibson, www .poledancingschool.com)

to regain her fitness following the car accident that ended her professional ballet career. Pole dancing not only succeeded in returning her to full fitness but became her passion and gave her a new and exciting way to continue exploring the art of dance; leading her eventually to be crowned Miss Pole Dance World in 2005. (2012) This narrative accompanies a committed address to the potential consumer — “I am confident pole dancing can help you the way it helped me” — which is enthusiastically endorsed by exceptionally positive participant feedback. In this sense, fitness pole dancing exemplifies Morini’s “feminization of the work process” in terms both of labor practices and “the new anthropological focus that work claims to assume through the intensive exploitation of quality, abilities and individual skills (capacities for relationships, emotional aspects, linguistic aspects, propensity for care)” (2007:42). Transformation extends also to choreographic form. The trailer for Pole Dancing School’s new downloadable lessons opens with Gibson, clad in a black tutu, performing en pointe to synthesized strings, moving, via a transitional drumbeat, to an electropop tune and images of the dancer performing a series of precise and highly athletic tricks on the pole, now wearing a black leotard and trainers, and occasionally reappearing in the tutu. The aesthetic is clean and monochrome, accentuating the lines of the dancer’s lean physique, suggesting both a transmutation of the ballet form, but, as Samantha Holland argues of pole dancing more generally, a fundamental relation to it (2010:60). The distanciation from the scene of the strip club is more or less complete, except, of course, for the persistent presence of the pole. As the spectacularizing focus of the movement, the pole — an obviously phallic apparatus —  necessarily showcases individual performance for the pleasure of an audience. The sessions of the women-only beginners courses I attended, each delivered by two different companies, took very similar dramaturgical form — a standardized procedure reflected in Samantha Holland and Feona Attwood’s own accounts of practice (2009, 2010). Commencing with a warm-up to hip hop and R&B tunes — stretches, lunges, sit-ups, push ups — the class then moved on to spins (also called tricks), poses, moves (or filler moves — small performative segments used by pole dancers as inconspicuous opportunities to catch their breath), and floor work. They would conclude with a cool-down. The categories of movement featured in “early strippers’ wholebody choreography” (Liepe-Levinson 2002:111) and the basis of contemporary forms of striptease — “the gyrations of the ‘bump,’ the ‘grind’ and the ‘shimmy’ [...] and the signature sexy walk of each performer known as the ‘strut’ or ‘parade’” (111) — acted as the foundation for pole-dance movement. One of the first moves I learned was the strut around the pole, which provides momentum for spins, enhanced by the use of high heels (which for me were otherwise cumbersome, my inexperience resulting in accidental calf scratches and ungainly landings). Hotpants or shorts were mandatory, for the practical purpose of providing a more secure grip on the pole than clothed legs would offer. The spins themselves required a great deal of strength, but, as Holland and Attwood note, the practice, in the manner of ballet, “draws on a tradition of women’s strength being controlled or concealed rather than displayed” (2009:177).

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The objective in performing the movement is to achieve the appearance of lightness, grace, and elegance. Some movements were more explicitly eroticized than others, either in the chosen name (for example, the Secretary, a spin miming a demure seated position) or the action to be enacted (the body ripple, the head flick). And, in terms of the fitness outcome, over time, “pole classes deliver gendered embodiment [...;] while developing the poler’s physical strength and confidence, it also doesn’t ‘butch up’ the poler; her muscles are toned and lengthened” (Holland 2010:184). In this light, Samantha Holland’s insistence that “pole classes are not performed for male spectators; nor, therefore, are the performances predicated on sexualized display” (187) seems oddly to confuse “the male gaze” (a technology of vision in which women’s “appearance is coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote tobe-looked-at-ness” [Mulvey (1975) 1999:837]) and the physical presence of men with eyes.

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Conclusion Fitness pole dancing is, in industrial terms, a paradigmatic example of precarious labor in the “new economy” of entrepreneurial and freelance work that encompasses a range of positions relative to financial security. In terms of gender, pole dancing enacts the conditions of McRobbie’s retooled “sexual contract”: with access to waged labor, women can participate in the marketplace as choosing consumers, and therefore feminist politics has been made to seem antiquated and unnecessary. With fitness pole dancing, an obvious point of critique would be the drive to acquire the “gendered embodiment” (Holland 2010:184) aligned to that of heterosexual male fantasy, or, in the more demotic terms of feminist blogger Nine Deuce, in compliance with “the Fuckability Mandate” (2011). I do not suggest that such constructions can’t be queered or satirized, or that pleasures aren’t available “even from within dominant discourse” (Liepe-Levinson 2002:124). Given its extraordinary popularity, this would certainly be a difficult argument to make of fitness pole dancing. My argument here is explicitly concerned with symbolic relations, forms of identity performance, and the ways in which “the p ­ olitical and economic dominance of the capitalist class is maintained and reproduced” (O’Connell Davidson 2002:86).

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At the heart of the arguments of both Pateman (1988) and Federici (2004) is the way in which capitalist patriarchal structures come to be constructed. In 1988, when Pateman’s The Sexual Contract was first published, these structures, she suggested, were “no longer as solid as they were between, say, the 1867 Reform Act and the turmoil of 1968” (233). In the 21st century context of “resurgent patriarchy,” which involves a reassertion of “virile masculinity,” I see fitness pole dancing as a technique that asserts those divisions afresh by rigidly defining and enacting “masculine” and “feminine” identity positions, and — like the burgeoning scene of corporate adult entertainment more broadly — by “normalizing specific forms of homosociality and heterosexualty by ensuring that certain forms of adult entertainment are accessible and visible in the urban landscape, while others remain hidden or marginalized” (Hubbard et al. 2008:365). There is clearly a “correct” way for women to perform pole dancing, which corresponds to the slender form and inaccessible mystique of the feminine. The grotesquerie of Christina Applegate’s performance as Roxy Fedaro plays upon this, as does that of Petra Massey as Joan of Arc in the British comedy troupe Spymonkey’s On Fire (2008). In Spymonkey’s cabaret sketch, performed at the burlesque revue Miss Behave’s Variety Nighty at the Camden Roundhouse in 2008, the inept captors of the heroine fail to set the stake to which they have tied her on fire, which she then uses to pole dance to Britney Spears’s “...Baby One More Time” (1999). Ripping off her modest dress to reveal a leotard decorated with a pattern of flames, Massey rubs her pudenda and fingers against the pole, uses its tip to simulate fellatio, and awkwardly kicks her legs; the sketch concludes with two naked male soldiers leaping about the pole doing the same. This clownish piece satirizes heteronormativity and the sexual double standard, comically confusing stereotypically masculine and feminine constructs of gender, which correlate both to the segregation of men and women in the contexts of the strip club and the fitness pole-dancing class, and, of course, to the roles of husband and wife.

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While pole dancing is firmly located in the cultures and practices of the supposedly more radical scene of neoburlesque, it is equally firmly located in the “stag” and “hen” rituals of the contemporary wedding industry. In the strip club, women perform for men in a commoditized relationship of service and are remunerated for doing so. In the fitness pole-dancing class, women usually pay other women for their provision of a teaching service. Regular participation in fitness pole dancing is not considered inimical to nuclear family values, as seen in the press coverage of the accident suffered in 2010 by 32-year-old Debbie Plowman, in which she was left paralyzed following a headfirst fall from a pole. The accident was not the occasion of public debate about fitness pole dancing, beyond a recommendation from the Pole Dance Community advisory body regarding safe practices, but rather an assertion of the tragedy of the accident in relation to Plowman’s qualities: “a fantastic mum, an amazingly beautiful wife, and the most

caring and honest person anyone could want to meet” (The Sun 2010; Blake 2010). Though employed by the supermarket chain Tesco, Plowman is represented first and foremost, as a “mother-of-two.” Meanwhile, the strip club, a place of employment, aptly discloses the theatricality of gender construction and “alienation from the body as a distinguishing trait of the capitalist work relation” (Federici 2004:135). Consider the case of Samantha McGaw: A waitress at a lap dancing club who was suspended after she became pregnant has won £60,000 in a sex discrimination case. Samantha McGaw, who wore hotpants, a waistcoat and fishnet stockings while tending tables at Spearmint Rhino in Tottenham Court Road, was told not to turn up for shifts when her bump started to show. The 27-year-old asked to wear a less-revealing outfit, but the suggestion did not find favour with her employers. (McGlown 2002) Although the costume she was required to wear in her work was egregiously stereotypical, as an employee in 2002 McGaw was able to claim breach of contract regarding this specific instance of discrimination and to seek reparation (McGlown 2002). Similarly, Nadine Quashie’s current legal challenge to Stringfellow’s nightclub to assert the status of dancers working in the establishment not as “self-employed” but as “employees” has been described as a “test case” (West End Extra 2011), which, if successful, may transform lap dancers’ precarious working conditions (Moore-Bridger 2011). Meanwhile, we might see fitness pole dancing as a kind of post-feminist scheme in which profit is pursued through the informal provision and exploitation of activities that overtly construct hyperfemininity as not only desirable, but normative. If these activities also covertly construct female subjectivity as one of (pleasure-giving) service, it is through participation itself made possible through waged labor. However ambivalently or ironically the practice is constructed and received, I understand this as the scene of a double form of exploitation, and that “by these means of containment in the landscape of spectacular femininity women are removed once again from public life, the political sphere and from the possibility of feminism” (McRobbie 2007:734). Given the disproportionate effect upon women of post-crash governmental budget cuts, and the current assault on women’s reproductive freedoms in both Britain and the United States, the depoliticizing normalization of “spectacular femininity” is symptomatic of a “feminist tragedy” (734) with implications not just retrograde, but disturbing. References Aradia Fitness. 2012. www.aradiafitness.com/site/index.php (9 July). Associated Press. 2010. “Pole dancing seeks Olympic inclusion.” The Independent, 22 February. www .independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/pole-dancing-seeks-olympic-inclusion-1907036.html (26 July 2012). Blake, Heidi. 2010.“Young mother paralysed in pole dancing accident.” The Telegraph, 16 September. www .telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/dance/8005408/Young-mother-paralysed-in-pole-dancing-accident .html (26 July 2012). Brents, Barbara G., and Teela Sanders. 2010. “Mainstreaming the Sex Industry: Economic Inclusion and Social Ambivalence.” Journal of Law and Society 37, 1:40–60. Budgeon, Shelley. 2011. “The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New’ Femininities.” In New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, 279–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Business Dictionary. 2012. “What is direct response advertising?” BusinessDictionary.com www.business dictionary.com/definition/direct-response-advertising.html (9 July). Butler, Judith. (1990) 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

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Secrets. 2012. “Pole Dancing Lessons.” www.secrets-clubs.co.uk/explore-secrets/pole-dancing-lessons/ (9 July). Shteir, Rachel. 2006. Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spymonkey. 2008. “Spymonkey on Fire.” www.spymonkey.co.uk/web08-demovideo-frameset.htm (9 July 2012) Sun, The. 2010. “Pole dancing left mum paralysed.” The Sun, 15 September. www.thesun.co.uk/sol /homepage/news/3139530/Pole-dancing-left-mum-paralysed.html (26 July 2012). Tyke. 2003a. “London Strip Scene Gossip, January 2003.” Strip-Magazine. www.strip-magazine.com /node/197 (9 July 2012). Tyke. 2003b. “London Strip Scene Gossip, March 2003.” Strip-Magazine. www.strip-magazine.com /node/199 (9 July 2012). “Very Funny Ad (Renault Twingo).” 2009. YouTube, 11 January. www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_vyn M2wUPs (9 July 2012). Vertical Dance. 2012. www.verticaldance.com/verticaldance.htm (9 July). Walter, Natasha. 2010. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. London: Virago. West End Extra. 2011. “Test case for ‘employed’ adult dancers — Nadine Quashie, 28, takes Stringfellows to tribunal over work status.” West End Extra, 25 November. www.westendextra.com/news/2011/nov/test -case-employed-adult-dancers-nadine-quashie-28-takes-stringfellows-tribunal-over-w (26 July 2012). Whitehead, Kally, and Tim Kurz. 2009. “‘Empowerment’ and the Pole: A Discursive Investigation of the Reinvention of Pole Dancing as a Recreational Activity.” Feminism & Psychology 19, 2:224–44.

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