Racialized sexualization & agency in exotic dance among women

Through the analysis of two years of ethnographic observations and 40 in-depth interviews with a collective of Black and Puerto Rican exotic dancers (referred to herein as "Divine Dancers") who perform exotic dance for other women, this article explores how spatial expressions of sexuality within the context of a woman-only exotic dance venue enables both the resistance and reinforcement of circulating discourses of race, gender, and sexuality that construct sexual desirability under the male gaze. In contrast to literatures on exotic dance that center the heteromasculinist arrangement of the U.S. gentleman's club, this article centers the construction of a woman-only exotic dance space that is absent of men and white women. I situate this analysis within critiques put forward by the feminist sex wars to argue that space and place, in tandem with racialized sexualization, shapes women's potential to enact agency in the domain of exotic dance. In this article, I focus on the contestation of whiteness as a normative standard of beauty by Divine Dancers, and the ways in which norms regarding touch and intimacy are regulated within this exotic dance setting, which I argue allows for new interactions between dancers and audience members. This article disrupts binary understandings of exotic dance as either exploitative or demeaning, focusing instead on dancers' interpretations of agency as expressed through the body in space. I find that the extent to which Divine Dancers find this spatial context sexually empowering is shaped through gendered sexuality and their experiences with racialized sexualization.