Sexscapes of Pleasure

Book excerpt: Focusing on Italy, this book discusses how women negotiate sexuality and social status in a Western sexscape constituted by multifaceted articulations of women’s sexuality, commodities and modernity. Drawing from ethnographic research, this book brings together the narratives of Italian and migrant women pole dancing for leisure, women pole and lap dancing for work, as well as women selling sex. By tracing commonalities in women’s processes of subjectivation and othering across the non/sex working women divide, the book foregrounds the intersecting structures of oppression under which women negotiate selfhood.