Undressing the First Amendment and Corsetting the Striptease Dancer

Abstract

In a unique way, the stigmatized but poorly understood exotic (also referred to as erotic, striptease, stripper, topless, titty bar, nude, go-go, and barroom) dance clubs are a lightning rod for certain cultural conflicts in the United States. The NIMBY (Not-In-My-Backyard) issue (Fruedenberg 1984; Mann 1989) pits segments of the community against exotic dance stakeholders. Controversy centers on what exotic dance is and its relation to the First Amendment, morality (religious and feminist), and economic impact (on dancers and communities).' Anthropologists have conducted research that shatters stereotypes about such issues as race, gender, and nature; these studies have had real-world consequences. In this article I aim to illuminate why exotic dance is controversial and how the controversy reveals much about contemporary American culture. Perhaps this work on exotic dance, law, and society may supplant urban planning and conflict resolution based largely on stereotypes and generalizations (see American Planning Association [APA] I997). Viewing power and cultural forms as inseparable, Michel Foucault offers theoretical guidance for considering politics and culture through the analysis of the body (1978). In American culture, which in many ways represses the body, the exotic dancing body moves within contested practices of power and knowledge. Simon Roberts explains how law furnishes the normative 'map' informing the life-world of a society's members as they experience it, and it provides one of the central means through which government exercises a steering role (1994:692). Victor Turner's (1974) theory of a four-phase social drama also helps us to understand the exotic dance controversy. These phases consist of: first communicating a breach of norms, then fomenting a crisis, followed by ameliorating and avoiding social drama, and lastly, proclaiming the schism or celebrating the reintegration. Contentious issues related to government regulation and to judicial decisions concerning exotic dance warrant attention: (I) dance as expression (speech) and art, and thus protected by the First Amendment, (2) the mo-