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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 Aguileras 2002 song Dirrty, the perky Applegate addresses her audience from the
sprung floor of a gym studio, rolling gum in her cheek. Hey. Im Roxy Fedaro. And Im 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 DVDs title: ...Pre-Natal Pole Dancing! (PNPD). Around
two minutes in length, PNPD pastiches the direct response genre of TV commercialthat
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 genres c onventions:
third party testimonial (Ive never had this much success with any other thing that Ive 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 Schools new downloadable lessons with founder and former ballet
dancer Elena Gibson, clad in a black tutu. (Courtesy of Elena Gibson, www.poledancingschool.com)

TDR: The Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012. 2012

78 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
product demonstration (pole dance, chair dance, booty beat r outines), citation of results
(youll 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. Applegates
PNPD fitness instructor character (five months pregnant) c onfides: Many pregnant women
experience these things called hormones and because youre a total fat-ass, you dont feel sexy
anymore. But thats why you need something I like to call Seducidence! Thats seductive con-
fidence put together. The two pregnant workshop participants, MeeghanR. ( Jessalyn Gilsig)
and Lonnie R. (Wendi McLendon-Covey)actors familiar from their roles in Glee (2009
11) and Bridesmaids (2011)3laboriously 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 res-
onant fart: It happens. Hell understand. As she grinds against the pole, her voiceover declares
breathily: I cant see my fuckin lady parts anymore. But I can still show you how I work em...
Callnow!
Notwithstanding its 1.9 million views on Funny or Die, PNPD isnt completely s uccessful as
a piece of comedy. Its satire can be somewhat heavy-handed, the call, for example, for partici-
pants to work that FETUS! offering an unsubtle spin on Diana Rosss 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 intersec-
tion of both with precarity. In common with the real-world proprietors of r ecreational or fit-
ness pole-dancing schools, Applegates character is an entrepreneur, a self-making woman
who has spotted a gap in a marketor, 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 asexy, 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 shes down for sex, insists Fedaro. Meeghan R., Mother
of Four offers: I can use these pole-dancing moves anywhere. I mean, anywhere theres music
you could start dancing, right? And a lot of men seem to like it, which isgood. Because I actu-
ally dont know who the father of my baby is...
In connecting the use of dance moves as enticement with the burden of single mother-
hood, 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 motherhoodthe one, Terri, a wife pre-
tending 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
Applegates relationship with the Pussycat Dolls, the burlesque troupe turned pop group with whom she per-
formed in 1996, make this text a particularly interesting response to the post-feminist discursive environment.

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
Work That Body

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). l.owen@bbk.ac.uk

79
 raunch as liberation (see Levy 2005:745), 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 economya context producing
the conditions for a market of preventative or punitive measures to thwart teen motherhood
(2005:40, 41; see also McRobbie 2009:8586).
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 opportu-
nities 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
demandshave 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 perfor-
mances, 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 nation-
wide, 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 bur-
lesque, 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 fre-
quently 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. Scholarssome of whom are sympathetic to the sex-positive positionthus
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).
In contrast to sex-positive arguments regarding fitness pole dancings ambiguously liberating
qualities, and, at the other extreme, to moralizing readings of pole dancing as an inevitable gate-
way to prostitution (Walter 2010:5153), I explore the decade-long expansion of fitness pole
dancing as a consumer activity in relation to institutionalized systems of domination inte-
gral to capitalism (Glick 2000:31). The practice is thereby located in the context of the resur-
gent 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-feminisms key value has obscured the continued purchase of older construc-
tions of womens work and precarity that critically relate to service, and logically underpin
fitness pole dancing itself.

4. This figure is an average calculated on the basis of a search of local public leisure center websites in July 2012.
Louise Owen

See Holland (2009:4041) for a fascinating account of womens attitudes to the relatively high cost of pole
fitnessclasses.

80
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, 1415). Symptomatic of such cultural practice is a famous ad from
1998 for Citron Xsara, featuring Claudia Schiffers knowing performance of a burlesque strip-
tease. 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 cars 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 cri-
tiques 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 nave 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 know-
ing Claudia Schiffer to be one of the worlds most famous and highly paid supermodels.
Once again the shadow of disapproval is evoked (the striptease as site of female exploi-
tation) 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 femi-
nism is invoked so that it might be undone. (2009:17)

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 com-
plaints 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 mothers antic-
ipated disapproval of her daughters advertised performance as Lola in a risqu (but taste-
ful) 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 didnt 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, val-
orization 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 revision-
ist effect. The twin of McRobbies spectre of feminism is, after all, the spectre of patriar-
chy, which, by rigorously individualizing their protagonists, such texts seek to repress (see Gill
2007:72; Glick 2000:3032; Power 2009:2738). For McRobbie, a Deleuzian concept of lumi-
nosity best articulates the spectacular and depoliticized public visibility young women are per-
mitted to assume, now only able to come forward on condition that feminism fades away
(2009:54, 56). The acceptable aesthetic contours of womens 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).
Work That Body

The contemporary discourse of precarity has a close historical and institutional relation-
ship 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

81
 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 resis-
tance to the increasing incidence of precarious labor. Cristina Morini calls this the feminiza-
tion 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). Morinis degendering of work refers to a
situation in which all waged labor gradually acquires (and demands) the characteristics com-
monly attributed to womens 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 man-
age both their private and public selves (52). McRobbie argues rather more forcefully that
scholarship elaborating on feminization of work and cognate conceptual categories (immate-
rial labor, post-Fordism, and so on) exhibits a kind of gender-blindness to material experi-
ences, in effect relegat[ing] questions of gender and race to the realm of the less than abstract
(2011:62). In this respect, Judith Butlers treatment of precarity in terms of the discursive con-
struction of precarious lifepeople who fall outside of the purview of the protections of the
socialenlargesthe 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).
Butlers 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 so-
called 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 capitalisms emergence, in which differences of gender,
race, and sexuality have been systematically asserted as the basis for accumulation by dispos-
session (Harvey 2010:249). Carole Patemans important text The Sexual Contract (1988) the-
orizes 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 impor-
tant 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 persona concept to which I shall
return in relation to the empowerment putatively on offer via participation in fitness pole danc-
ingthe attributes and capacities in question are intellectual and emotional, and, Pateman
argues, imagined as functional to womens childbearing capacity. The body of the individual,
she notes,

is very different from womens bodies. His body is tightly enclosed within boundaries, but
womens bodies are permeable, their contours change shape and they are subject cycli-
cal 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 origi-
nal contract and transforming themselves into civil individuals who uphold its terms. (96)

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
Louise Owen

wife, she obtains her means of support (protection) from her husband, and also the means

82
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 Federicis work demonstrates that the contract theorists arguments followed hard
upon the efforts of states and elites to assert violent control over the very reproductive capaci-
ties 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 (2004:8889). 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 com-
munal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus lib-
erated 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, lay-
ing 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 formationwhich 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 com-
mand 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 womens economic fortunes at the high tide of liberalism in the 19th cen-
tury (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 rightsthe right of hus-
bands to have sex with their wives at willwhich 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 1988:12324). Just as today, Federici argues, by repressing women, the rul-
ing classes more effectively repressed the entire proletariat (2004:189).
In her own work, 20 years after Patemans, McRobbie refunctions the term sexual contract to
advance her argument about the incorporation of women into 21st-century political and eco-
nomic arrangements. For McRobbie, sexual contract signifies a convergence of attentions
alighting upon female bodies and their activities (2009:89). In this contract, she writes, eco-
nomic 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 relega-
tion 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 2004:68283). 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 Wont Give Up Her Day Job
Fitness Pole Dancing, Work, and Leisure
In the UK, the exotic dance sectorincreasingly dominated by large, corporate gentlemens
clubs providing female theatrical entertainment involving nudity, as a notice inside Spearmint
Rhino on Tottenham Court Road in London puts itrepresents a particularly extreme scene of
precarious labor conditions: large sums of money might be earned, but self-employed danc-
ers 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 theatri-
calization of intimacy and femininity for the male consumer (Mavin and Grady 2011:911).
Meanwhile, providers of fitness pole dancing take steps to distance themselves from associa-
tion 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 environ-
ment (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, ubiq-
uitous 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 silhou-
ette 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 Peoples 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 its physical, its fitness, its dancing [...] its not restricted to strip
clubs any more, in fact its 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 dont talk about these things, were now starting to embrace things like pole dancing (Pole
People 2006). Negotiating mutually contradictory discourses with agility, Polascheks 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 Sanderss 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 etal. 2011:453).
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 2006:199211). Nor is it only a conse-
quence 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 dont

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
Louise Owen

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).

84
have strip bars (Tyke 2003a). In Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment (2010), Samantha
Holland quotes Jennifer, a former ballet dancerturnedprofessional 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 didnt interest me at all (2010:65). FYEOs 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 pub-
lished 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 coin-
cided with, and even pre-dated offerings catering to, and stimulating, the resurgence of inter-
est in burlesque, training continues to be staged by corporate gentlemens clubs. The club chain
Secrets advertises its current course with a rhetoric of sensuality and confidence-building simi-
lar 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 wide-
spread availability of fitness pole-dance training now also influences working practices at lap-
dancing clubs in other ways. As a professional lap dancer told interviewers, describing the utility
of pole dancing as a technique for attracting customers:

Youve got to really try to connect with the customers when youre onstage. I just enjoy
itI love being onstage anyway, I love pole for fitness, so its obviously a good way for
me to just express myself when Im up there. [...] Pole fitness is really bringing itself into
the club, its good when you can be impressive onstage. (Lapdancingproject 2011)

Clearly, however, the recreational pole-dancing class involves a different kind of transac-
tion 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 compar-
ison and consumer forum, of a recreational pole-dancing class in Edinburgh organized to cele-
brate her sisters 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 oclock 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 les-
son 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 Im sure I couldnt 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 teachers expert performance and vertigo-inducing shoes demonstrate the extent to
which this, an excessive-become-normative form of femininity, requires practice to main-
tain. If someone is performing skilled labor, it is definitely not the hens; indeed, the reviewer
continues: I have a new found respect for Pole Dancersits really tricky and very hard work
Work That Body

6. Striptease artist Jo King set up the London School of Striptease, the course to which Tyke refers, in 2000, iden-
tifying 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.

85
 (Carcraig 2008). However, carcraig wont give up her day job, the title of her review, nonethe-
less imposes rhetorical distance between herself and the real pole dancers for whom she has
new found respect.
This claim to ineptitudeboth 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 ambiv-
alent 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 intervieweesspeech,

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 recre-
ational pole dancer is constructed as having choice and control because of being the con-
sumer 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 medi-
ate 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 histor-
ical 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 per-
formances taking place in strip clubs and fitness workshopsand subsequently, it is implied
here, night clubs in which poles are installed, and homes for which portable poles may be pur-
chasedis 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
OConnell Davidsons materialist understanding of liberal discourse on property, labor, and
contractual consent as fictions concealing class power (2002:94) challenges this ideology. As
she writes:

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 con-
cept of property in the person, then, is that it conceals the relations of power and depen-
dence that exist between those who pay others to do their will, and those who get paid to
surrender their own will and do someone elses bidding. (2002:86)

OConnell Davidsons critiquepart of a discussion of prostitution and the peculiarity of

the vexed relationship between sex and selfhood (87)accords with Patemans in pointing
towards domination and subordination as necessary aspects of the wage-labor exchange enacted
by free agents. Whitehead and Kurzs 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 enlight-
ened 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 politi-
Louise Owen

cal, its economic through and through (26).

86
 Opportunities to participate in fitness pole dancing in safe environment[s] for perfor-
mancea safety based, according to the narrative above, on a secure distinction between the
categories of the real and the theatricalhave 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 observationsWe watched the strippers, practised every day, and it was
really hardthey 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, some-
thing which had the potential to give pleasure, or, ideally, even to enhance livesand
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 poles 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 dancings distance from big multinational fitness brands makes it
somehow a womens 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 control-
ler; PA; belly dancer and journalist; retail manager; choreographer; receptionist. One revealed
that she pursued Lots of different little things, Im trying to be entrepreneurial, Ill try to think
of inventive creative ways of making money and then, try them out. I also work in a crche 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 stu-
dent) our licence owners are able to generate an attractive income from a part time commit-
ment, 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 80s/90s DJs to create awesome parties
Work That Body

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

87
 every Friday and Saturday night (Pole People 2012a), enabling participants to immerse them-
selves in neoburlesque culture. The company also advertises to potential venuesupmarket
style bars, restaurants, fitness centres and dance studios (Pole People 2012b)to host classes
typically for young professional women 1840 (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 com-
pany websites serve to reposition pole dancing as a primarily aesthetic or sporting phenomenon,
or a strategy for self-improvementthe rhetoric of self-transformation of course being a crit-
ical ideological component of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Pole Dancing Schools particular
offer, for example, brings pole dancing into relation with classical dance:

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

Figure 2. Elena Gibson performing a series of precise and highly athletic tricks on the pole to an electropop
Louise Owen

tune in the promotional trailer for her schools downloadable lessons. (Courtesy of Elena Gibson, www
.poledancingschool.com)

88
 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 consumerI am confident

pole dancing can help you the way it helped mewhich is enthusiastically endorsed by excep-
tionally positive participant feedback. In this sense, fitness pole dancing exemplifies Morinis
feminization of the work process in terms both of labor practices and the new anthropolog-
ical 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 Schools new downloadable lessons opens with Gibson, clad in a black tutu, perform-
ing 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 aes-
thetic is clean and monochrome, accentuating the lines of the dancers lean physique, suggest-
ing 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 polean 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 forma standardized procedure reflected in Samantha Holland
and Feona Attwoods own accounts of practice (2009, 2010). Commencing with a warm-up
to hip hop and R&B tunesstretches, lunges, sit-ups, push upsthe class then moved on to
spins (also called tricks), poses, moves (or filler movessmall 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 whole-
body choreography (Liepe-Levinson 2002:111) and the basis of contemporary forms of strip-
teasethe 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 other-
wise cumbersome, my inexperience resulting in accidental calf scratches and ungainly land-
ings). 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 womens strength being controlled or concealed rather than displayed (2009:177).
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 cho-
sen 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 polers physical strength
and confidence, it also doesnt butch up the poler; her muscles are toned and lengthened
(Holland 2010:184). In this light, Samantha Hollands insistence that pole classes are not per-
formed for male spectators; nor, therefore, are the performances predicated on sexualized dis-
play (187) seems oddly to confuse the male gaze (a technology of vision in which womens
appearance is coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-
Work That Body

be-looked-at-ness [Mulvey (1975) 1999:837]) and the physical presence of men with eyes.

89
 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 posi-
tions relative to financial security. In terms of gender, pole dancing enacts the conditions of
McRobbies 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 hetero-
sexual male fantasy, or, in the more demotic terms of feminist blogger Nine Deuce, in compli-
ance with the Fuckability Mandate (2011). I do not suggest that such constructions cant be
queered or satirized, or that pleasures arent available even from within dominant discourse
(Liepe-Levinson 2002:124). Given its extraordinary popularity, this would certainly be a dif-
ficult 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 (OConnell
Davidson2002:86).
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 Patemans 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 cen-
tury 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, andlike the burgeoning scene of
corporate adult entertainment more broadlyby normalizing specific forms of homosocial-
ity 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 etal.
2008:365). There is clearly a correct way for women to perform pole dancing, which cor-
responds to the slender form and inaccessible mystique of the feminine. The grotesquerie of
Christina Applegates performance as Roxy Fedaro plays upon this, as does that of Petra Massey
as Joan of Arc in the British comedy troupe Spymonkeys On Fire (2008). In Spymonkeys cab-
aret sketch, performed at the burlesque revue Miss Behaves 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 Spearss ...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 awk-
wardly 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 corre-
late 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.
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 commod-
itized 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
Louise Owen

advisory body regarding safe practices, but rather an assertion of the tragedy of the accident in
relation to Plowmans qualities: a fantastic mum, an amazingly beautiful wife, and the most

90
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 theatri-
cality of gender construction and alienation from the body as a distinguishing trait of the capi-
talist 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 Quashies current
legal challenge to Stringfellows nightclub to assert the status of dancers working in the estab-
lishment 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 par-
ticipation 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 exploita-
tion, 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 fem-
inism (McRobbie 2007:734). Given the disproportionate effect upon women of post-crash
governmental budget cuts, and the current assault on womens 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.
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