Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town (review)

Through interviews conducted informally over a six-month period, Susan Dewey presents a multidimensional view of female sex workers, a group American society largely dubs invisible. Rather than focus solely on the conditions of the workplace or the social stigmas associated with sex work, Dewey provides a deeper look at a smaller sample of women. Among the fifty women interviewed, Dewey conducted more extensive life story interviews with dancers self-named "Diamond," "Star," "Chantelle," "Cinnamon," and "Angel," who each spoke candidly about their impressions of their work and how they believed their jobs affected—or did not affect—their private lives. Few had the support of their biological families and most were supporting children as single parents. Dewey's interviews gave her subjects an opportunity to voice their very real concerns about their workplace safety, their quests for unconditional love, and the long-term impacts their jobs might have on their children. Their stories result in an emotional work that pushes readers to think about larger questions of gender roles, economic stability, and the feminization of poverty.

Dewey begins by clarifying that "Vixens" is a pseudonym for the actual topless bar in upstate New York where she conducted her research. She began her investigation with clear research questions in mind: What does dancing topless mean to the women who do it? Do these women agree with the social judgment that they have violated rules of motherhood and femininity? Do they care? How do they view themselves as women, workers, and mothers? While the questions were straightforward, the answers were not. Dewey discovered that for the women she interviewed, answers to questions like these highlighted the complexities of balancing one's own idea of self, agency, power, and control with society's popular concepts of femininity, motherhood, and self-sufficiency.

In the Introduction and chapter 1, Dewey introduces readers to the world of topless dancing. Chapters 2 and 3 define the ways in which labor, including sex work, is feminized and the routine survival strategies dancers must employ. In chapters 4 and 5, Dewey uses the dancers' own voices to show the complexities of balancing motherhood, family, and personal obligations with the internal and external conflicts associated with sex work in general. The final two chapters discuss the physical, psychological, and economic risks dancers must take as a consequence of their employment.

While Dewey suggests that her subjects specialized in blurring boundaries in their work performances, the Vixens dancers interviewed held very clear ideas as to how and why their work was superior to nude dancers as well as to sex workers who engaged in prostitution. They saw themselves in a position of superiority that allowed, and in fact seemed to encourage, judgment of other women choosing different versions of sex work. The dancers showed no interest in social service support via government assistance programs because, as Star expressed adamantly in chapter 3, she and the other Vixens dancers were not "welfare queens" (52). While their jobs required them to perform particular versions of gender and femininity, their own understandings of themselves sharply contradicted that conscious submissiveness. Many of the dancers described themselves as strong and independent in spite of their position as sex workers. Yet as Dewey's work shows, sex workers were trapped in cycles of economic instability and poverty that plague much of the American population.

Using ethnographic analysis and self-representation, the author hopes that by giving these women a voice, it will demystify them as people. The women interviewed were quick to define economic opportunity as the major factor in determining their job choice. With few job skills and little education, the dancers at Vixens rationalized that they possessed skills in performance and character judgment, which they could use to increase their potential earnings via tips. Yet what Dewey found was that although high earning nights did happen, overall, dancers at Vixens earned about the same annual...