Live G-String Divas Unite!
G-String Divas was a reality television series that began airing in 2000 on HBO. Although the series only had nine episodes, it continues to live on in late-night reruns (and is available on websites that index pirated television content). The show followed the lives and work of a group of nine dancers who worked at a club in Philadelphia, PA.
The show was marketed as erotica to straight men; the website for the show invites them “inside the sexy, flirtatious lives of erotic dancers.� Accordingly, the show featured copious amounts of nudity, depicting the women working on stage and doing lap dances in slow motion with soft lighting and cheesy softcore porn music in the background.
However, the show was not as one-dimensional as its marketing copy would make it seem. It featured personal interviews with the dancers in which they talked honestly about their lives and their feelings about their work. Although some of the dancers were portrayed as being enthusiastic about what they did and seeing it as empowering, others said candidly that they thought it was boring, but that it paid the bills. In the process of showing them working, they were seen in both positive and negative relationships with co-workers and customers. They were also shown in their lives outside the club – the women included an artist and one who had a master's degree in psychology, and they were shown dealing with issues such as jealous boyfriends, religious upbringings and the stigma that they faced from the outside world because of their work.
The show also deals extensively with the dancers' performance of gender identity, although it does not describe it as such. Performativity is an integral part of sex work. Dancers work hard to perform and portray a fantasy of an idealized woman. However, they also have to negotiate performing this idealized female role with the fact that their use of overt sexuality directly contradicts it; they have to play both the madonna and the whore, “giving performances that break conventional patriarchal notions of female sexuality while simultaneously reinforcing patriarchal norms� (Fogel). The dancers use more than their acting skills for this performance; they have to attempt to literally embody this ideal. In order to portray this exaggerated ideal of femininity, they make up, dress up, and work to change their bodies. Episodes of the show included “Recipe for a Stripper's Body,� featuring the women giving tips on using exercise, diet and surgery to make themselves proper objects of the male gaze.
The feminine ideals that they work to embody are so far from reality that they require considerable amounts of work to even approach, but they are more attainable for some women than others. Sex work makes this very plain: women who do a better job of playing the role make more money, but the playing field is not level. For example. the one Black dancer in the otherwise all-white club, Cashmere, feels that she has to straighten her hair to fit in with white standards of beauty. The dancers are ranked by body, skin and hair type and color, with the ones who can most easily fit these standards at the top. That said, making money in strip clubs often has at least as much to do with hustling skills than looks. Cashmere expresses in her interview that she has to work harder to get to the same place – much as women of color often have to in the real world. Although she never uses the word "intersectionality," it, like much of the theory we have studied, is clearly at play.
Works Cited:
Fogel, Curtis. “Presenting the Naked Self: The Accumulation of Performative Capital in the Female Strip Trade.� Gender Forum. Köln: 2007. , Iss. 17;1 pgs