Cabaret Dancers’s Transnationality

Cabaret dancers working in night clubs in Switzerland represent a heterogeneous group that embodies a particular form of female mobility. Some of them are genuinely “world travelers”: they work in erotic clubs in Switzerland, Japan, or Lebanon, go home regularly to be with their children or their families, or continue their education. In this article, I am interested in understanding the factors influencing the specific transnational formation of cabaret dancers. Analysis of interviews with cabaret dancers reveals that their specific form of transnationality is the result of the transnational nature of the sex industry, the women’s ability to form “weak” ties with a range of local actors, their own resourcefulness in terms of mobility, and the opportunity structure of the local context in Switzerland. Their transnational formation, which relies highly on mobility and a specific “knowledge of how to move,” is also related to their activities as sex workers in the context of (globally and locally) constructed ideas about ethnicity and sexuality.