The Unpaid Labor of Nightclub Promoters

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This chapter explores the parallel beauty economy in nightlife that relies on the unpaid labor of beautiful women, who are recruited by nightclub promoters to attract the right crowd. The speaker discusses their experience studying the promoters and gaining access to their behind-the-scenes organization of nightlife.

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What interesting social phenomena can be observed at nightclubs? What are "whales" hoping to achieve by spending big at nightclubs? Trying too obviously to increase social status tends to backfire; so how can people buy status without appearing to do so? What do "promoters" gain from these social interactions? How does their work differ from or overlap with sex work? How can they make money without being seen as "gold-diggers"? What ethnicities tend to comprise these nightclub groups? How do wealthy people attempt to navigate the norms of the various elite substrata which expect them both to put their wealth on display and to do so without being ostentatious or gaudy?

Ashley Mears is a professor of sociology and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Boston University, and she's the co-founder of the Ethnographic Cafe and BU's Precarity Lab. She received her BA in sociology from the University of Georgia in 2002 and her PhD in sociology at New York University in 2009. Working primarily at the intersections of economic and cultural sociology and gender, she studies how societies value people and things; she researches value and exchange in the context of labor, beauty, free stuff, elites, consumption, and social media; and she has written on theory and qualitative methods. She has held visiting positions at the University of Amsterdam and the Central European University in Budapest. In 2021-2022, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. She currently serves on the editorial boards of American Sociological Review and Qualitative Sociology. Learn more about her at her website, ashleymears.com.

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