In the following two performance texts, the author uses autoethnography and feminist and performance theory to explore agency and ethics as they operate in the culture of a strip club. Part 1 is an autoethnography in which the author investigates issues of agency from a dancer’s perspective. In part 2, the author reports and reflects on her experience in a gay male strip club, writing from the position of spectator, customer, and ethnographer. By exploring this site from both ends of the gaze, the author hopes to complicate and problematize notions of agency, as well as call into question research ethics, especially when these ethics collide with desire in the field.
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