This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated “rust belt” of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, Neon Wasteland shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.
 
“Dewey contributes to a growing wave of qualitative research on the sex industry by providing deep ethnographical insight into the lives of five poor women who work at a low-end strip club.”
— Choice
“Fresh. . . . As keen as it is thorough. . . . Neon Wasteland is a provocative, highly readable analysis.”
— Social & Cultural Geography
"Through heartfelt ethnographic storytelling, Dewey provides a nuanced treatment of exotic dancers. This is a wonderful book."—Patty Kelly, author of Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel

"Neon Wasteland is a riveting and compelling book. Dewey's reflections and analyses are richly descriptive and insightful. She poignantly relates the stories of these women but also never lets the reader forget the stark social inequalities that are part of these women's daily lives."—Jennifer K. Wesely, PhD, co-author of Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women