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Meika Loe

Social research is concerned with the definition and assessment of social phenomena. Many social phenomena in day-to-day interaction are taken for granted, such as riding on a city bus, the daily routine inside a beauty salon, and children playing on a playground. Social researchers enable us to get inside these diverse social settings and discover what social forces are at work in creating social life. This selection, written by Meika Loe, an associate professor of sociology, anthropology, and women’s studies at Colgate University, takes us inside the social world of waitressing. The award-winning study excerpted here was written by Loe when she was an undergraduate. It utilizes in-depth interviews and participant observation to reveal how gender and sexuality affect one workplace culture.

This [reading] is an investigation into power, gender, and sexuality in the workplace. This research is based on six months of participant observation and interviews at a restaurant I will call “Bazooms.”¹ Bazooms is an establishment that has been described both as “a family restaurant” and as “a titillating sports bar.”² The name of this restaurant, according to the menu, is a euphemism for “what brings a gleam into men’s eyes everywhere besides beer and chicken wings and an occasional winning football team.” Breasts, then, form the concept behind the name.

The purpose of this [reading] is to examine the dynamics of power, gender, and sexuality as they operate in Bazooms’ workplace. This is a setting in which gender roles, sexuality, and job-based power dynamics are all being constructed and reconstructed through customer, management, and waitress interactions. The first half of the [reading] describes how power, gender, and sexuality shape, and are concurrently shaped by, Bazooms’ management and customers. The second half deals specifically with how Bazooms waitresses attempt to reshape these dynamics and to find strategies for managing the meaning and operation of gender, power, and sexuality. By using Bazooms waitresses as examples, I hope to show that women are not merely “objectified victims” of sexualized workplaces, but are also active architects of gender, power, and sexuality in such settings.

Source: Meika Loe, “Working at Bazooms: The Intersection of Power, Gender, and Sexuality” from Sociological Inquiry 66, No. 4 (November 1996): 399–421. Copyright © John Wiley and Sons. Reprinted with permission.