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Bourbon Street, B-Drinking, and the Sexual Economy of Tourism
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2018
Summary
B-drinking is a strategy whereby dancers, waitresses, and otherwise legally employed women illegally solicit drinks from tourists for pay. Unique to the ethnographic literature on strip clubs, Bourbon Street, B-Drinking, and the Sexual Economy of Tourism focuses on the role of alcohol sales in the sexual economy of Bourbon Street, New Orleans. Relying on historical material, Demovic reveals that the intimate encounters B-girls have provided have been a part of the tourism service economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. The evolution of “B-girldom” as an imagined identity created through changing representations of the practice over the decades have both reflected and constructed the experiences of women working in New Orleans’ nightclubs. The B-drinker is an iconic character found in fictional and nonfictional accounts of the city. B-girls inhabit an ambiguous structural position in the performance of heritage tourism in New Orleans. Participant observation and interviews reveal that by the 1990s women who worked as B-drinkers were significant stakeholders in French Quarter tourism, able to use their informal networks to seize power over working conditions in the tourism economy of Bourbon Street. Demovic focuses on how these marginalized but critical workers have responded to stigma by creating tight knit groups which continue to support one another decades after leaving their work on Bourbon Street. This book adds the New Orleans example to a broader understanding of how sex work evolves in ways that reflect regional history and culture. Widening the ethnographic lens, Demovic looks past strip tease itself and to the economic activities of such workers when they are off the stage.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2018
ISBN-Print
978-1-4985-3132-0
ISBN-Online
978-1-4985-3133-7
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
189
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Entering “The Field” No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 38
1 Why B-drinking Works No access Pages 39 - 52
2 B-girls in Public Discourses No access Pages 53 - 70
3 Finding B-girls in the Ideoscape No access Pages 71 - 88
4 The Cultural Geography of Power and B-drinking in the 1990s No access Pages 89 - 116
5 Understanding the Perspectives of B-girls at the Turn of the Century No access Pages 117 - 150
