Neon Wasteland On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town [Hardcover]

This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated rust belt of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor,Neon Wastelandshows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

Susan Deweyis Assistant Professor of Gender & Womens Studies and adjunct in International Studies at the University of Wyoming. She is the author ofMaking Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization IndiaandHollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India.

Through heartfelt ethnographic storytelling, Dewey provides a nuanced treatment of exotic dancers. This is a wonderful book. Patty Kelly, author ofLydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel

Neon Wastelandis a riveting and compelling book. Dewey's reflections and analyses are richly descriptive and insightful. She poignantly relates the stories of these women but also never lets the reader forget the stark social inequalities that are part of these women's daily lives. Jennifer K. Wesely, PhD, co-author ofHard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
2. Feminized Labor and the Classed Body
3. El“&