This article employs recent writings on governmentality to make sense of the ways that labour on the margins of the market and morality are being re-configured in late modernity. By tracing the trajectory of Ottawa strip clubs from 1974 to 2000, the authors demonstrate how the industry and its workers are (re)constituted by shifting discursive contexts, and by economic, legal and social processes. During this time period the restructuring of the labour process from entertainment to service interacted with regulatory strategies including moral contamination arguments, city planning and health management. The authors illustrate how within the normative parameters established by the courts, questions of morality, responsibility and risk get played out. Within this context, and consistent with neo-liberalism, strippers are increasingly constituted as self-regulating moral subjects. On the margins however, her «freedom» is conditioned by a complex web of legal, community, as well as labour discourses and practices.