In the final scene, a new dancer is being trained, and the message of the stripper as automaton—all surface and labor, a series of interchangeable female bodies—lingers as Tracee’s trademark song plays (“Living On a Thin Line” by the Kinks). Three strippers walk by, talking about her. One says she heard she went outside with Ralph and never came back. Another cautions, “Keep what you hear to yourself.” In her role as resisting reader within the text, Tracee reminds us that the stripper body has often been a site of struggle over what can be said or not said, and under what circumstances, a struggle over what is “obvious”—an ideological struggle—from the question of misogyny on The Sopranos (is the show obviously sexist or not?) to the problem of objectification in feminism (is stripping obviously oppressive or not?) to the element of commerce in all heterosexual relationships (is money merely a less obvious exchange in marriage than in lap dances?). The stripper body is, in its most euphoric formulation, a guileless, honest revelation of unspoken social conventions. But as Akass and McCabe write (about another character on the show), “This powerful narrative position—to say what should not be said—is, however, a precarious one” (154). Tracee finds out just how precarious as her resistance is shut down by the thirteen lethal blows she takes from Ralphie, yet the gruesome text of her lifeless body remains before our eyes, confronting Tony and the audience with the foolishness of the frame, a haunting critique of whore stigma.
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