In a modern patriarchal society, women often receive the message that their appearance and sexuality dictate their value as human beings. Some populations, like exotic dancers, capitalize on this construction by receiving monetary rewards for the visual and physical consumption of their sexual bodies. Through interviews with female exotic dancers, the author investigates the ways that these women were sexualized at a young age, often through abuse. The author probes how they negotiated both their child and adult sexual selves and how this intersected with feelings of power and powerlessness and their eventual choices to become dancers. This study demonstrates the complexity of the lives of these women as they try to reclaim power by selling their sexualized bodies for money while still enduring abuse within this context.
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