UA Professor Explores Lives of Exotic Dancers and the Cultural Influences of Strip Clubs in New Book

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A friend’s surprising decision to leave graduate study to pursue life as a stripper inspired Dr. Catherine M. Roach, an associate professor in The University of Alabama’s New College in the College of Arts and Sciences, to examine the lives of strippers and how popular culture has embraced the world of strip clubs.

The result of her exploration, the scholarly book “Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture,” is publishing this month by Berg Publishers. Roach will give a reading at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25, in Gorgas Library, room 205.

Roach uses a qualitative research approach to discover how women working in strip clubs see their lives, their roles, and their customers.

“I interviewed dancers and visited as many clubs as I could,” says Roach, who also is affiliated with the department of women’s studies at UA. “A lot of that comes out in the book. It’s a narrative with stories and voices from the dancers.”

Roach’s interest in strippers and striptease culture arose when a longtime friend of hers from her native Canada left a graduate program in the Midwest and starting working in a strip club.

“When she was telling me about her new job at the club, my first response was shock,” says Roach, who earned her doctorate in religious studies at Harvard and researches environmental ethics, gender, and popular culture. “Surely this is not a good thing for a young woman to be doing. We’re both self-identified feminists working in feminist areas. From that perspective, I worried about whether the job was degrading and dangerous. Aren’t the clubs seedy? Isn’t this sexual objectification of women? Why are you doing this, I wanted to know.”

But her friend, Roach says, had another concept of her work as a stripper – one that Roach wanted to explore further as a scholar. She says she continued to keep an open mind toward exotic dance and other work of a sexual nature as her feminist-based preconceptions were challenged.

“My friend liked it, and actually from a feminist perspective, she was finding this to be empowering and positive in various ways, not just financially — although that was a big part of it — but also socially and sexually,” Roach says. “It was working well in her life. So I felt fascinated by that and wanted to know more.”

Over the course of four years, Roach pursued her research by interviewing dancers, neo-burlesque performers, prostitutes, organizers in the sex workers’ rights movement, and others from the areas of West Palm Beach, Fla.; Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; San Francisco; Toronto; and Ottawa. Her book ranges from descriptions of strip clubs and in-depth interviews with dancers to the meaning of a culture that increasingly embraces the open sexuality that strip clubs embody.

“It’s this huge phenomenon that’s taken off in pop culture in contemporary America,” Roach says. “There are stripper aerobics classes at your local gym now. There are pole dancing studios. Sales of thongs have skyrocketed. If all of this is going on in pop culture all the time, what should we make of it?”

New College is a part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Team.