Abstract

The bar provides an important site for hyper-performativity in which to observe interactions in North American society. This research examines how dynamics between actors in a bar (bartenders, servers, customers, managers and coworkers) produce, reproduce and contest gender and status differences through techniques of seduction and power. My methods of research include drawing on insight from my personal experience working in bars, participant observation and in-depth interviews with 17 male and female workers. I examine the costs and benefits of emotional management in the workplace, the reproduction of gender performances through sexual division of labor, emotional management and alcoholic beverages, as well as the ways in which power is produced and exercised between individuals of varying status. A workers level of integration of self into their work role is a significant factor in determining their job satisfaction level as well as possible psychological implications of the work process. Workers with high levels of autonomy possessed the greatest levels of job satisfaction. Men and women exercise power in different ways, and therefore, power is also gendered but is not restricted to the asymmetrical limitations explicit in gender and status differences. Although the micro-politics of resistance do not elicit major and immediate changes on a macro-scale, it is important to acknowledge moments of resistance between individuals as essential sites of analysis of both men and women as active participants in the cycle of production, reproduction and contestation of existing societal values related to gender and status differences.