The article “Strip Club” by Kim Price-Glynn explores her 14 month foray into the culture of a strip club that she coyly nicknames the lion’s den. She chronicles her experiences both by participant observation, as she worked as a cocktail waitress, and by a series of interviews of both club patrons and employees. Price-Glynn appears to use the Feminist perspective as she focuses heavily on the environment of the club and the supposed sexism and discrimination faced daily by the female employees.
Price-Glynn’s integration into the culture of the strip club was instrumental in allowing her to access the interviews and gain the trust of the patrons. She accomplished this by being recommended by a current employee, allowing her to pass as “Angela’s friend,” which helped to make the employees and patrons less wary of her presence. Price-Glynn also established from the beginning that she was doing research, which arguably could have damaged her ability to gain accurate data through her own participant observation, however, according to Price-Glynn, “since I disclosed my plan to conduct research when I was hired, I could openly pursue my study,” meaning the nearly forty interviews that
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First off, the majority of the female employees were in their late teens/early 20’s, while the patrons were mostly above the age of 30. Secondly, the backgrounds of the employees were rather diverse being pretty evenly split between single and taken (with some cohabitation), and varying levels of educational achievement, with a large portion seeking higher education. A common trope amongst the employee interviews that Price-Glynn collected was that she often heard “its work, it’s a job” and many references to the “sometimes lucrative earnings.” These statements and the conclusions drawn from the data show that the women working here saw their jobs as an effective way of achieving a larger