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Risqué Business
Breastaurants in American Culture
Ty Matejowsky (Author)
9780817362164
Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2025
254 pages, 6 B&W figures
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.4 kg
"[Matejowsky's] writing style is very accessible and clear throughout. . . . [Risqué Business] paints a compelling picture of the ubiquity of these restaurants and draws out some of their broader implications." —David E. Sutton, author of Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples
Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix. Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of "breastaurants": sports bar–style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, is uniquely positioned in America's foundational, breastaurant-saturated landscape. From this vantage, he offers a well-balanced account that draws on pop culture, media analysis, and contemporary gender politics. He delivers a smart, layered analysis of how breastaurants commodify youth and femininity, uphold retrograde masculinity, and serve as symbolic battlegrounds in today's highly charged political environments including America's deeply polarized Red State/Blue State divide. With case studies, cultural critique, and a critical lens on labor and sexuality, Matejowsky reveals how these restaurants are more than just risqué marketing gimmicks. They reflect deeper anxieties about gender, identity, and the uneasy fusion of sex and service in American consumer culture. Risqué Business is a high-spirited study of an industry that thrives at the intersection of appetite and identity.
List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Breastaurant Reflections Chapter 2. Breastaurant-Related Matters Chapter 3. Breastaurant Events Chapter 4. Talk Flirty to Me Chapter 5. Crimes, Misdemeanors, and Debates Chapter 6. Popular Culture Depictions and Breastaurant-Adjacent Undertakings Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index