Exotic dancers in an awkward negotiation: Implications for affect control theory

• Our study tests affect control theory predictions about a specific deviant identity (stripper).
• Our findings indicate that strippers do not act as predicted by affect control theory.
• We suggest that strippers (and possibly other deviants) will tend to perceive their own identities generally more positively than will others.
• We argue that the veracity of affect control theory predictions about deviance is contingent on the perspective of the individual(s) imputing meaning about the behavior.

We use affect control theory (ACT) to test the veracity of mathematically derived predictions that an exotic dancer will act in ways that are consistent with societal expectations for her “deviant” label. We also explore the strategies that exotic dancers use to maintain the definition of the situation. Our findings indicate that exotic dancers do not define their own identities as predicted. Our data also demonstrate that participants in our study were at least as likely to manage the identities of others as they were their own identities. We conclude our paper by discussing our interpretations of the data and the veracity of ACT.