Читать книгу Mapping the Social Landscape - Группа авторов - Страница 78

Bazooms is a good deal more than a “family” restaurant or a place where men can “swill beer and ogle blondes.” It is a theater in which dramas of power, gender, and sexuality are played out. Within this drama, women play an explicitly subordinate role. As MacKinnon, LaPointe, Reskin and Roos, and Hochschild point out, their behaviors are severely constrained by the realities of employment in the service sector. Women are hired to put on a specific performance, and at Bazooms they are constrained by the formal script that Bazooms encourages its employees to follow. Furthermore, women are limited greatly by the assumptions men make about the appropriate and desirable place for women, especially in a sexually charged atmosphere. In the Bazooms environment, it is easy to classify these women as objects.

Yet, women are also actively shaping their own experiences at Bazooms. The constraints on their actions are severe, but within them women struggle to retain their self-esteem, exercise power, and affirm the identities they value….

Bazooms girls are not helpless performers. They are women struggling to find ways to alter their roles, rewrite the script, and refashion the nature of the drama…. Women sometimes also turn the play to their own advantage, finding opportunities to increase tips, support their kids, and even find some affirmation of self-worth.

In sum, the waitress is not a passive casualty of the hardships of her work. Within the structure of the job, she has developed an arsenal of often subtle but undeniably effective tactics to moderate the exploitive elements of her occupation and secure attention to her own needs (Paules 1991:171). Few people passively watch their lives go by. The notion of agency suggests that workers in all fields, regardless of their formal options, actively take at least some control of their own destinies. In the voices of Trina, Katy, Christine, and others we can hear women responding to their circumstances and asserting themselves as agents within the Bazooms drama.