Stripping Them of Legal Status: The Making and Unmaking of the Exotic Dancer Visa Program

This paper explores the factors which influenced the making and unmaking of this controversial and internationally unique temporary visa program. Through a review of literature, public documents, and media records I deconstruct this policy; analyze its rationalities, assumptions and mechanisms; and conclude with a discussion on the implications for foreign-born exotic dancers whose lives are marked by Canadian politics turmoil. I argue that the government's decision to discontinue the program has negatively impacted the human rights and quality of life of foreign-born exotic dancers who, quite possibly, made the dangerous transition to the existing group of undocumented workers in Canada. While the Exotic Dancer Visa Program was problematic in many ways these migrant women were protected by legal status, thus decreasing, but not eliminating, their vulnerability as women, as immigrants, and as workers.

Stripping Them of Legal Status: The Making and Unmaking of the Exotic Dancer Visa Program

This paper explores the factors which influenced the making and unmaking of this controversial and internationally unique temporary visa program. Through a review of literature, public documents, and media records I deconstruct this policy; analyze its rationalities, assumptions and mechanisms; and conclude with a discussion on the implications for foreign-born exotic dancers whose lives are marked by Canadian politics turmoil. I argue that the government's decision to discontinue the program has negatively impacted the human rights and quality of life of foreign-born exotic dancers who, quite possibly, made the dangerous transition to the existing group of undocumented workers in Canada. While the Exotic Dancer Visa Program was problematic in many ways these migrant women were protected by legal status, thus decreasing, but not eliminating, their vulnerability as women, as immigrants, and as workers.

The Perfect Victim: ‘Young girls’, domestic trafficking, and anti-prostitution politics in Canada

This article explores debates among politicians in Ontario, Canada, regarding anti-trafficking legislation introduced in 2016 and 2017. We find that contemporary discussions in the political sphere have shifted away from concerns about the trafficking of migrant exotic dancers and toward the sexual exploitation of girls and young women, represented as idealised, inculpable victims. We suggest that this conflates the diverse experiences of girls and adult women, configures them all as child-like, and renders both groups as being in need of state protection. The new ‘perfect victim’ serves to legitimise policy approaches that criminalise sexual services, despite those laws being deemed harmful to sex workers in courts and other venues.

Male Strippers and the Toll of Exotic Dance

While researchers have looked at the impact stripping has for female exotic dancers, very little attention has been given to the consequences the profession has for male strippers. In this research, I draw from 22 in-depth interviews with male exotic dancers and 18 months of fieldwork at a strip club to examine the extent to which male strippers experience “the toll” of exotic dance. Specifically, I focus on dancers’ interactions with customers, their experiences with stigmas, the impact stripping has on their romantic relationships, how they negotiate boundaries with patrons, and the consequences stripping has for their self-esteem. Overall, I found that patriarchal privilege and the sexual double standard significantly mitigated the toll of the profession.

Constructing Eroticized Latinidad: Negotiating Profitability in the Stripping Industry

Through the analysis of an 18-month ethnography at an exotic dance club located in the Northeastern United States (referred to as Playpen), I uncover how Latina exotic dancers manage their participation in exotic dance by deploying constructions of Latinidad as embodied cues. I focus on Playpen’s weekly event, “Latina Night,” to demonstrate how racialized, sexualized, and gendered constructs relative to Latinidad are produced and regulated in this exotic dance setting. Study participants draw on embodied markers to negotiate how their bodies are read. Those markers include nationality-based appeals, time elapsed since migration, and the ability to express constructions of Latinidad through dance performance. I draw on intersectionality as a conceptual tool, filtered through a sensibility to Latina/o/x lives and experiences, to analyze the nuances of racialization as experienced by Latinas. This approach destabilizes the U.S. black–white racial binary and opens intersectionality to a more nuanced understanding of the production of Latinidad. By approaching racialization as an embodied phenomenon, I elucidate how bodily markers, beyond skin color, become imbued with racialized meaning and condition racialized erotic capital. No less important is how participants draw on racialized, gendered, and sexualized tropes to benefit racialized erotic capital.