"Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town

This paper draws upon Hubbard's (1999, p. 57) term ‘scary heterosexualities,’ that is non-normative heterosexuality, in the context of the rural drawing on data from fieldwork in the remote Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie. Our focus is ‘the skimpie’ – a female barmaid who serves in...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pini, Barbara, Mayes, Robyn, Boyer, K.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Elsevier Ltd 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/16965
_version_ 1848749327389818880
author Pini, Barbara
Mayes, Robyn
Boyer, K.
author_facet Pini, Barbara
Mayes, Robyn
Boyer, K.
author_sort Pini, Barbara
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description This paper draws upon Hubbard's (1999, p. 57) term ‘scary heterosexualities,’ that is non-normative heterosexuality, in the context of the rural drawing on data from fieldwork in the remote Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie. Our focus is ‘the skimpie’ – a female barmaid who serves in her underwear and who, in both historical and contemporary times, is strongly associated with rural mining communities. Interviews with skimpies and local residents as well as participant observation reveal how potential fears and anxieties about skimpies are managed. We identify the discursive and spatial processes by which skimpie work is contained in Kalgoorlie so that the potential scariness ‘the skimpie’ represents to the rural is muted and buttressed in terms of a more conventional and less threatening rural heterosexuality.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T07:19:10Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-16965
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T07:19:10Z
publishDate 2013
publisher Elsevier Ltd
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-169652017-09-13T15:42:21Z "Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town Pini, Barbara Mayes, Robyn Boyer, K. Heterosexuality Sex-workers Australia Mining Rural This paper draws upon Hubbard's (1999, p. 57) term ‘scary heterosexualities,’ that is non-normative heterosexuality, in the context of the rural drawing on data from fieldwork in the remote Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie. Our focus is ‘the skimpie’ – a female barmaid who serves in her underwear and who, in both historical and contemporary times, is strongly associated with rural mining communities. Interviews with skimpies and local residents as well as participant observation reveal how potential fears and anxieties about skimpies are managed. We identify the discursive and spatial processes by which skimpie work is contained in Kalgoorlie so that the potential scariness ‘the skimpie’ represents to the rural is muted and buttressed in terms of a more conventional and less threatening rural heterosexuality. 2013 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/16965 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.06.002 Elsevier Ltd restricted
spellingShingle Heterosexuality
Sex-workers
Australia
Mining
Rural
Pini, Barbara
Mayes, Robyn
Boyer, K.
"Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
title "Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
title_full "Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
title_fullStr "Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
title_full_unstemmed "Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
title_short "Scary" heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town
title_sort "scary" heterosexualities in a rural australian mining town
topic Heterosexuality
Sex-workers
Australia
Mining
Rural
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/16965