Response to Lois Helmbold, "Women's Studies in Sin City: Reactionary Politics and Feminist Possibilities"

In the last issue of the NWSA Journal (Summer 2005), Lois Helmbold offered an account of her experiences as chair of the Women's Studies Department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) in, "Women's Studies in Sin City: Reactionary Politics and Feminist Possibilities." Three years as the head of the department have given Helmbold a point of view that is different from our own as members of the wider Women's Studies community at UNLV. We have a close community of feminist scholars, and we offer here another perspective on our location at UNLV.

Helmbold's essay begins with a picture of students who have been showgirls, curators at the Liberace Museum, married seven times; who love classes like Porn in the U.S.A., go to basketball games where 4-year-olds perform heteronormative sexuality, and are "naïve" about race, class, or gender (Helmbold 2005, 171). As feminists, both newcomers and old timers living and working in Las Vegas, we have found that over-simplified views of Las Vegas as a retrograde, sexist city, miss the counterintuitive ways in which many women have greater access to power here than they might elsewhere. Instead of dismissing or criticizing students with unique Las Vegas life experiences as "naïve," we should listen to students for what they can teach us about twenty-first-century feminism.

The picture of women's power in Las Vegas is more complicated than stereotypes suggest. Las Vegas's political economy is distinctive because it is generally built on women's labor, and to a large extent, women's sexualized labor. However, it has one of the most highly unionized service industries in the nation, and these relatively high-paying service jobs make it possible for many women here to earn livable wages. Furthermore, women's political power in Las Vegas, and in Nevada, is greater than in most of the nation (Nevada currently ranks ninth in the nation for women holding elected office) partly because of women's contributions to the historical development of the state. UNLV has had a female president for the past 12 years, and the university has, with a few exceptions that Helmbold's article highlights, encouraged the growth of Women's Studies, first as a program, and now as a department. Unlike Helmbold's experience, it has been our experience that UNLV has provided longstanding institutional support for Women's Studies. We believe this is precisely because of the contradictory nature of women's power here. The labor market and political environment in Las Vegas actually provide a glimpse into the future of late capitalist consumer culture nationwide. Instead of concluding that the Las Vegas political economy is bad for women, we feel that the challenge is to teach and learn from the contradictory contributions such a political economy makes to women's power.

The objectification of women and commercialization of sexuality are institutionalized in the culture of Las Vegas. Sexualized billboards and images are ever-present, and unavoidable. Helmbold notes that students are "fascinated, repelled by and blasé about the use of women's bodies" (Helmbold 2005, 174). Rather than dismissing this as an "inconsistent response to feminism," we listen to students' arguments that these images are not necessarily all negative. While heterosexuality dominates, sexual diversity is more visible here, and invites open conversation and debate. Some women's sexual power is more valued and celebrated. Though sexual diversity and women's sexual power are perhaps more commodified than not, Las Vegas's culture has fostered social acceptance of women who work in sexualized industries, and a recognition that they are workers, and not simply exploited, objectified, sexualized bodies. Rampant commodified images of sexuality are part of the fabric of late capitalist culture generally, and not just in Las Vegas. Instead of rejecting such images as anti-feminist outright, we feel that the challenge is to explore what women gain, and lose, within the diverse dimensions of sexualized late capitalist consumer culture...