Body work is a central activity in the practice of many workers in the field of health and social care. This article provides an introduction to the concept of body work -paid work on the bodies of others -and demonstrates its importance for understanding the activities of health and social care workers. Providing an overview of existing research on body work, it shows the manifold ways in which this can inform the sociology of health and illness -whether through a micro-social focus on the inter-corporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through elucidating our understanding of the times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and the increasingly global movements of bodies, workers and those worked-upon. The article shows how understanding work undertaken on the bodies of others as 'body work' provides a mechanism for relating work in the sphere of health and social care to that in other sectors, opening up new avenues for research.

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Body work is a central activity in the practice of many workers in the field of health and social care. This article provides an introduction to the concept of body work -paid work on the bodies of others -and demonstrates its importance for understanding the activities of health and social care workers.Providing an overview of existing research on body work, it shows the manifold ways in which this can inform the sociology of health and illness -whether through a micro-social focus on the inter-corporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through elucidating our understanding of the times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and the increasingly global movements of bodies, workers and those worked-upon. The article shows how understanding work undertaken on the bodies of others as 'body work' provides a mechanism for relating work in the sphere of health and social care to that in other sectors, opening up new avenues for research.

This article explores the relationship between 'body work' and gender, asking why paid work involving the physical touch and manipulation of others' bodies is largely performed by women. It argues that the feminization of body work is not simply explicable as 'nurturance', nor as the continuation of a pre-existing domestic division of labour. Rather, feminization resolves dilemmas that arise when intimate touch is refigured as paid labour. These 'body work dilemmas' are rooted in the material nature of body work. They are both cultural (related to the meaning of inter-corporeality) and organizational (related to the spatial, temporal and labour process constraints of work on bodies). Two sectors are explored as exemplars: hairdressing and care work. Synthesizing UK quantitative data and existing research, the article traces similarities and differences in the composition of these sectors and in how gender both responds to and reentrenches the cultural and organizational body work dilemmas identified.

This paper seeks to illuminate the interactions of medics and other healthcare practitioners with women's bodies by looking at intervention in the area of women's sexual problems or 'Female Sexual Dysfunction' (FSD). Drawing on data produced in the first empirical study to date of women's accounts of their experiences of seeking and receiving treatment for perceived sexual difficulties, we analyse two treatments for women's sexual difficulties involving direct touch of the body: sexual medicine and pelvic physiotherapy. We adopt the concept of 'body work' as a way of illuminating practitioners' focus on the bodies of patients and the complex, contradictory meanings of genital touch brought by these interactions. We conclude by considering the goals and methods of these sexual therapies, the challenges that practitioners face, and the implications of all the above for women, their bodies, and their capacity for sexual enjoyment.

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Since the early years of the 20th century, work organizations have largely been places where animal bodies are absent or invisible. Recently, US and UK universities have facilitated therapy dog visits to improve students' wellbeing. In this article we analyse data on therapy dog visits to a UK university library as a starting point for thinking about other than human animals in organizations and the gendered dimensions of their inclusion and exclusion. Rather than focusing solely on the benefits of these encounters for students, we put the experiences of the dogs and their guardians centre stage, along with those of the library staff and the students. Drawing on observations of visits to a UK university library in 2015–2016, and a total of 16 interviews with library staff, guardians and students, we explore the instrumental rationale for the programme and the efforts to control any potential disruption of normative organizational expectations.