Bøker av Susan Dewey

This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated "e;rust belt"e; of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, Neon Wasteland shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing.

Miss India competition has become a prominent feature of Indian popular culture, influencing, over time, the conventional standard for female beauty. Through the lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, the author examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by political, economic, and cultural developments.