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Sexscapes of Pleasure
Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy
Elena Zambelli
184 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80073-685-6 $120.00/£92.00 / Hb / Published (November 2022)
eISBN 978-1-80073-686-3 eBook
Reviews
“Refuting disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, Zambelli’s book offers us a clarion call of rethinking on the categories that go into the constitution of 'sex work', and the worlds that are intertwined in them.” • Frank G. Karioris, University of Pittsburgh
“[This book] is very nicely written and engaging, and develops a compelling, multilayered and original analysis. The three empirical chapters provide interlinked analytical points that build a cogent exploration of the intersection of sexuality, work and respectability.” • Isabel Crowhurst, University of Essex
Description
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.
Elena Zambelli is an ethnographer with interdisciplinary expertise on gender and sexuality, race, migration, and intersecting inequalities. She currently works at Lancaster University as Senior Research Associate.
BLOG: Elena Zambelli on Sexscapes of Pleasure
Subject: SociologyGender Studies and SexualityAnthropology (General)
Area: Southern Europe
Contents
Download ToC (PDF)