Growing Up Sexualized: Issues Of Power And Violence In The Lives Of Female Exotic Dancers

In a modern patriarchal society, women often receive the message that their appearance and sexuality dictate their value as human beings. Some populations, like exotic dancers, capitalize on this construction by receiving monetary rewards for the visual and physical consumption of their sexual bodies. Through interviews with female exotic dancers, the author investigates the ways that these women were sexualized at a young age, often through abuse. The author probes how they negotiated both their child and adult sexual selves and how this intersected with feelings of power and powerlessness and their eventual choices to become dancers. This study demonstrates the complexity of the lives of these women as they try to reclaim power by selling their sexualized bodies for money while still enduring abuse within this context

The Body, The Self: How Women Ex-Offenders in a Re-Entry Program Negotiate Gendered, Embodied Identities, and the Implications for Desistance

Existing scholarship posits that gender is socially constructed, with meanings attributed to bodies that signify conventions of masculinity and femininity. Such embodied constructs are integral to self and identity, though these meanings can be negotiated and fluid. Recent criminological work has found that changes in identity are essential to desisting from crime and that desistance processes are gendered. Yet little extant literature has examined how gendered, embodied identities play a role in the lived experiences of women who offend as well as their efforts to desist from crime. This exploratory study aims to address this dearth. In-depth interviews with women ex-offenders in a re-entry program reveal two central constructions of gendered, embodied identity that framed the women’s descriptions of their lived experiences before and during their incarceration: sexualization and pathologization. These meanings played a role in participants’ efforts to desist from crime, contributing new dimensions of understanding about this topic

Where Am I Going To Stop?: Exotic Dancing, Fluid Body Boundaries, And Effects On Identity

Female exotic dancers earn a living through particularly objectified and sexualized constructions of their bodies. In order to increase cash reward, dancers may allow their body boundaries to be fluid, deciding on a customer-by-customer basis how they will interact physically. These body compromises can lead to a variety of identity problems for the women. This article thus builds on exotic dancing literature about stigma and deviance by incorporating a deeper look at these body and identity conflicts. Using in-depth interviews with female exotic dancers, this article explores the ongoing negotiation of fluid body boundaries experienced by the women who strip for a living, and the identity meanings and effects of related body compromises. © Taylor & Francis Inc

Co-constituting narrative: the role of researcher identity bids in qualitative interviews with women ex-offenders

Narrative criminology draws upon the stories of the research participants to better understand crime. These narratives are shaped not only by a range of structural, institutional and individual factors, but by dynamics within the interview itself. As both participant and interviewer deploy narrative techniques, they co-constitute identity meanings during the interview process. This study examines interviews with 30 women recently released from incarceration to identify ways that the researcher constructed and “bid” for identity meanings through narrative during the interview process. Specifically analyzed are the researcher’s “small stories” put forth in response to participants during the interview exchange. Ultimately, the co-constitutive nature of interview dynamics suggest that the researcher’s identity bids via small stories have implications for how participants assert their own identity meanings, account for their experiences, and ultimately orient or conceptualize their futures

Negotiating Gender: Bodybuilding and the Natural/Unnatural Continuum

Bodybuilding is a body technology that involves the building of muscle through hard work lifting weights. Although technologies like bodybuilding can reify dominant constructions of gender, I suggest that bodybuilding also reflects the attempts of participants to be active agents in the choices they make about their bodies. This article addresses the body as a work in progress and uses in-depth interviews with male and female bodybuilders to examine the ways that gender identity is consistently negotiated as participants reshape their bodies. This ongoing identity negotiation is reflected in the ways participants assess various body technologies like bodybuilding, muscle-enhancing drugs, and cosmetic surgery as natural or unnatural. Based on the responses, I explore the idea of a natural/unnatural continuum as a framework for understanding the ways that the participants fluctuate in their assessments of hugely built and other technologized bodies

Exotic Dancing And The Negotiation Of Identity: The Multiple Uses Of Body Technologies

This study investigates the multiple uses of body technologies by female exotic dancers and the relationship to dancers\u27 negotiations of identity. Using ethnographic methods, primarily in-depth interviews, this article probes the ways that dancers alter their bodies to earn money while also attempting to re-create different meanings through their bodies. In fact, the women use body technologies for multiple purposes but make choices about their bodies in a context that rewards them for only sexualized one-dimensional meanings. Body technologies both hinder and help the attempts these women make to manage subsequent identity complications and are engaged on different levels. This article highlights the ways that body technologies reflect the dancers\u27 struggles concerning body and identity

Negotiating Gender: Bodybuilding And The Natural/Unnatural Continuum

Bodybuilding is a body technology that involves the building of muscle through hard work lifting weights. Although technologies like bodybuilding can reify dominant constructions of gender, I suggest that bodybuilding also reflects the attempts of participants to be active agents in the choices they make about their bodies. This article addresses the body as a work in progress and uses in-depth interviews with male and female bodybuilders to examine the ways that gender identity is consistently negotiated as participants reshape their bodies. This ongoing identity negotiation is reflected in the ways participants assess various body technologies like bodybuilding, muscle-enhancing drugs, and cosmetic surgery as natural or unnatural. Based on the responses, I explore the idea of a natural/unnatural continuum as a framework for understanding the ways that the participants fluctuate in their assessments of hugely built and other technologized bodies

Skimming the Surface or Digging Deeper: The Role of Emotion in Students’ Reflective Journals During an Experiential Criminal Justice Course

Background: In successful experiential learning, cycling between experience and reflection promotes higher-order thinking skills. Emotions can either help or hinder productive reflection. The role of emotion as it applies to reflection cycles within experiential learning is not well understood, especially in the criminal justice area. Purpose: The research presented in this article examined how students’ emotional reactions shaped their reflection via journal entries and identified key points where these reactions are able to be routed into more developed phases of reflection. Methodology/Approach: Content analysis was used to study five sets of 10 students’ reflective journals during a college course entitled “The Role of Canines in Inmate Rehabilitation.” Findings/Conclusions: The exploratory study yields the themes of “Unpacking Emotions,” which examines emotions that emerged in students’ reflective journals, “Pivot Points” designating critical shifts in thinking, “Failure to Launch” when students were stymied in their reflective process, and “Potential for Action,” which addresses how successful reflection leads to future action. Implications: The ability to incorporate emotions into a more reasoned, critical analysis is essential to successful reflection and transformational learning, which has implications for students’ future in the field as well as their investment in community and society

Justice System Bias Perceptions of the Dually Marginalized: Observations from a Sample of Women Ex-offenders

Social constructions of race, gender, and class are known to shape stereotypes that condition interaction and behavior across various contexts, including the criminal justice system. From an intersectional framework emphasizing dual marginalization, this study relates in-depth interviews with women ex-offenders regarding their justice system experiences to explore perceived race and gender themed discrimination. Findings of reported pejorative language and degrading behavior reaffirm a well-documented generalized assumption by women of color that disparate treatment is normative. Discussion centers on how these views are detrimental to rehabilitation enrollment, related implications for offender programming objectives, and the utility of intersectionality theory for analyzing related justice topics

From The Inside Out: Efforts By Homeless Women To Disrupt Cycles Of Crime And Violence

The premise that childhood victimization is a risk factor for crime and violence in adulthood finds general support, though few agree that there is a direct causal relationship. Mediating factors and intervening variables are often studied. Rarely investigated, however, are the complex and difficult dynamics experienced by those enmeshed in these cycles of violence. In this study we explore the struggles of homeless women to disrupt patterns of violence in their lives. Using in-depth qualitative interviews, we illustrate how these women learn and understand that they are caught up in cycles of crime and violence and, to varying degrees, have made active efforts to disrupt them. However, we find that they have very few tools or resources with which this could be accomplished, which ultimately thwarts potentially successful efforts for lasting change while foregrounding deficiencies in systemic support. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC