Sexy Work Not Sex Work: How Dirty Work Gets Clean

Research on stigma is often divided between areas focusing on organizational stigma and job-based stigma, also known as dirty work. The dirty work literature has made strides in outlining the various ways in which dirty workers cope with stigma, but, unlike the organization stigma literature, has not elaborated de-stigmatization strategies. Drawing on interviews with 33 women working in the burlesque and stripping segments of the exotic dance industry, we explore how dirty work can get clean. Our findings reveal the ways in which the stigma of dirty work is not only attached to the work and workers, as existing literature suggests, but to the organizations it takes place in, and the associated audiences and scripts linked to these organizations. We show that by shifting out of stigmatized organizations, finding new audiences, and developing new scripts, actors without resources or power can shed the stigma of their work. Our findings thus enable us to link the dirty work literature to organizational stigma literature by pointing out the important ways in which they are related, and how dirty workers can clean their work without changing the primary elements of it.