Striptease and other types of erotic dance increasingly make up a large, lucrative and visible part of the sex industries in the United Kingdom and 'lap dancing' has become the focus of many important contemporary debates about gender, work and sexuality. This new book from Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy moves away from the more traditional focus on the relations between dancers and customers, to a focus on regulation and the working conditions experienced by those working in stripping work.

Teela Sanders is Reader in sociology at the University of Leeds with qualifications in both sociology and social work. Working at the intersections of sociology, criminology and social policy, she has published extensively in areas germane to sexuality/gender and regulation. Monographs to date include: Sex Work. A Risky Business (Cullompton: Willan 2005), Paying for Pleasure: Men who Buy Sex, (Cullompton: Willan, 2008). Co-authored texts include Prostitution: Sex Work, Policy and Practice (Sage, 2009). She has co-edited, New Sociologies of Sex Work (Ashgate, 2010), Body/Sex/Work - intimate, embodied and sexualised labour (Palgrave, 2013) and Social Policies and Social Control: New Perspectives on the Not-so-Big Society (Policy Press, 2014).

Kate Hardy is a Lecturer in Work and Employment Relations at the Leeds University Business School. Her research explores a feminist political economy of labour, with a particular focus on non-standard forms of work and the intersections between paid and non-paid forms of labour, work, employment and the body. Her research and scholarship is informed by a commitment to social change and a desire to bridge academia and activism through involvement in the feminist movement and other spaces of political activity. She has co-edited Body/Sex/Work - intimate, embodied and sexualised labour (Palgrave, 2013) and New Sociologies of Sex Work (Ashgate, 2010) and has articles in a number of journals, including the British Journal of Sociology, Work, Employment and Society and Emotion, Space and Society.

Introduction: Beyond the Stripping Wars Chapter 1. Locating the Strip-Based Entertainment Industry Chapter 2. From Pathology to Labour: The Discursive Landscape of Strip Clubs, Workers and Regulation Chapter 3. Empty shell licensing: law, reform and Sexual Entertainment Venues Chapter 4. The race to the bottom: working conditions and value production in the strip club Chapter 5. Professionals, pragmatists and strategists: Understanding labour supply in the UK strip industry Chapter 6. "No dancer ever earns money out of the pole": Attentive economies of stripping work Chapter 7. Falling through the regulatory gap: managing and licensing stripping Chapter 8. Speaking back: the feminist and class politics of stripping Conclusions. Proliferation, stagnation or decline? The UK strip industry now and beyond Dancers Interviewed.