“Quaint creatures”: public discourse and the role of B-girls in the heritage of Bourbon Street

ABSTRACT

B-drinking is soliciting a patron to purchase the B-girl a drink for which she receives a commission; this strategy has long been an integral and accepted part of French Quarter culture. Invisible in the academic literature, B-girls are an important part of heritage tourism in New Orleans. In a tourism city famous for alcohol, sex, and vice, B-drinkers are an important service labor force that drives the strip clubs at the center of the touristscape. Since the middle of the twenty-first century, B-drinking has played a crucial role in the sexual economy of tourism on Bourbon Street. B-girldom provides a case study in how the intersection of tourism and sex work is deeply embedded in regional history. The discursive B-girl as constructed in newspapers, media, and the legislature reflects local shifts in attitudes towards B-drinking from 1941 to 2012. B-girls, constructed as flirtatious tricksters or dangerous murderers, are icons of the French Quarter and an embedded fixture in this heritage tourism site – illegal but authentic inhabitants of Bourbon Street. Representations of B-girldom by powerful voices have long acknowledged and defined how sex workers engage within the French Quarter in ways understood and accepted by the people of New Orleans.

KEYWORDS:

• B-drinking
• New Orleans
• nostalgia
• urban heritage
• power

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Elizabeth Lonning and Rachael Sebastian for their assistance in the collection and management of archival data for this article. I would also like to thank William Silcott for his assistance in editing. This work was supported by the Sally and David Jackman Endowment for Anthropology.

Notes on contributor

Angela R. Demovic is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wichita State University. She has researched the interplay of gender, power, and tourism in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Zanzibar, Tanzania. She received her PhD in anthropology from Tulane University.

Notes

1. Observations in the 1990s were that women were required to solicit drinks as part of other forms of employment rather than “allowed” into bars which did not employ them.

2. I use Carol Leigh's term “sex worker” to discuss individuals who work in the sex industry, with a focus on a labor perspective. I include B-drinking in sex work, as it can vary from work very similar to telephone sex (low physical contact) to work that might include acts of prostitution or act defined as “against nature” (oral or penetrative contact). What all B-drinkers share is emotional labor included in many parts of sex work, and in most cases implicit engagement in a wide range of occupations through a willingness to find “the right girl for that customer” (Interview, July 2014).

3. By the 1990s, B-girls either ordered champagne drinks (the goal being to order by the bottle), or the drinks they preferred. But B-girl drinks were obviously priced differently than standard drinks customers would order for themselves. One bar in the early 1990s presented an elaborately printed wine card, listing bottle prices ranging from $150 to $1500, the B-girl receiving roughly 25% as her cut.