Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment

Front Cover
Springer, Mar 10, 2010 - Social Science - 212 pages
This book provides an international, multi-disciplinary empirical account of pole classes and how they fit into wider discourses about bodies and gender, and age and fitness. In particular, the book explores how women initiate agency and espouse liberation and empowerment through something as seemingly problematic as pole classes.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
1 Towards a Feminist Ethnography
8
2 From Circus and Sex
25
3 to Fitness and Leisure
43
4 What is a Pole Class?
60
5 What Not to Wear
78
6 Diversity and Empowerment?
92
7 A Thing of Beauty
110
Empowering Women with Confidence
143
Power Moves and Everyday Bodies
160
A Positive Active Identity?
177
Appendices
188
Notes
194
Bibliography
197
Index
205
Copyright

Opening Closed Minds
130

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About the author (2010)

SAMANTHA HOLLAND is Research Fellow, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Her research focuses on gender, ageing, and non-mainstream leisure and subcultures. Her publications include Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity and Remote Relationships in a Small World (edited).