“Women of ill repute”: Pariah femininities, retaliatory violence, and the negotiation of rebel identities among women bartenders

In the United States, work is a central institution that reflects and reproduces gender hierarchies that organize social institutions, interactions, and ideologies across social life. Through an ethnographic study of New Orleans‐area bartenders, this paper analyzes the everyday/every‐night experiences of women bartenders to understand how gender relations map onto women’s identity construction projects through their occupational role. I argue that women’s identity negotiation is constructed in relationship to gender hegemonies that produce female bartenders as pariah femininities outside the protections of respectable femininity. Sexual harassment, fetishization, and double standards are systematic forms of heteronormative punishment that ensure women bartenders remain feminized workers in masculinized workplaces. While women actively refashion retaliatory punishment into an affirmative self‐identity: the rebel barmaid, this study finds that through gender essentialist and individualist frames, the rebel barmaid falls short of revolutionary potential.