Surviving a Dying Industry: the Compounded Effect of Precarity and Stigma on Strippers in Britain

Like most forms of sex work and adult entertainment, stripping is and has always been a form of stigmatised and precarious work and in many ways resembles the gig economy. Over the last decade, the British stripping industry has furthermore been on a downward trend due to the closure of clubs, restrictive licensing conditions, and a decrease in demand for live nude entertainment. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated some of the trends towards casualisation and exploitation in stripping, and intensified digitalisation and platformisation of adult entertainment more generally. However, despite a decline in income potential, strippers do not seem to leave the industry completely. Instead, many have started to work in multiple sectors of the wider sex and adult entertainment industries alongside stripping, a trend that resembles wider transitions of work towards increasingly precarious and flexible labour markets. Strippers who work at the intersections with other sectors face specific issues due to legal frameworks that seek to prevent crossover between sectors and different levels of stigmatisation based on the whorearchy, which ranks different sectors of the sex and adult entertainment industries according to level of criminalisation and proximity to clients. This study applies a mixed methods approach involving a literature review, a self-administered online survey of 141 strippers, in-depth interviews with 16 of the survey respondents, and triangulation of the data in three sector-specific focus groups and engages with the key mechanisms that drive further precarisation and stigmatisation in the stripping industry as well as with the strategies of strippers to subsist within a dying industry. It uncovers a cycle of precarity and stigma which strippers are caught up in. While the Covid-19 pandemic intensified and accelerated precarisation in the industry overall, newly formed networks of solidarity and mutual aid temporarily disrupted this cycle.