Suchergebnisse

This article considers why we cringe at Hooters. Based on yearlong conversations with "Hooters girls" at one local restaurant, it illuminates productive tensions between young women, cultural representation, and research methodology. What can an embodied, generational postethnographic approach to one ideal—the Hooters Girl—reveal about the many conflicting ways young women are conceived or contested? I argue the work of Hooters girls—their representational labor as icons but also their critique of their service employment—challenges the political, ethical, and historical stakes of critical qualitative inquiry (QI). At Hooters, young women share an interpretive community (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). As a result, this research is less about who Hooters girls really are, what they say, or even the controversy over how they look, than it is about new ways to really look with them.