Customer Relationships

Preface

Stripping, Social Class and the Strange Carnalities of Research

My social class expressed itself like genetic code, presciently providing knowledge of the strictures of capitalism, long before I ever read Marx or learned the word “proletariat.” Walking the tight rope between working class and working poor, families in my neighborhood hoped for the best, but expected the worst (not an unreasonable assumption during the Reagan-nomic trickle down years). In the midst of these tensions I knew, before anyone told me, that women from my community might end up performing erotic labor. Somewhere inside I realized that we were more likely to be sex workers, than surgeons. Just as surely I knew the boys I played with would probably end up with grease under their fingernails or iron bars surrounding their bodies instead of in Brookes Brothers. As a six-year-old girl arriving home from St. Genevieve Elementary School in my blue-checked and yellow...