Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

Touching intimacy: Bodywork, affect and the caring ethic in erotic gay massage in Taiwan

“…The reciprocal interactions in lesbian erotic dance further complicate heteronormative ideals of female sexualities (Pilcher, ). Kimberly Hoang's study () of Vietnamese female sex workers elucidates how bodywork intersects with intimacy and economic rationality in the global sex industry. In the transnational marketplace, workers' different expressions of body/emotion management reflect social positionings of clients, and their diametrically distinct forms of work‐on‐body respond to racialized desires.…”

“…My focus on same‐sex engagements extends studies on what Paterson (, p. 162) terms the potentially ‘empathetic and transformative capacity’ of touching in massage work and the provision of alternative intimacies for the marginalized outside normative gay desire. By extending feminist insights into an under‐researched dimension of male sex work, my work contributes to an emerging literature on intimate and embodied labour in sexual commerce and meaningful relations in male‐for‐male sexual transactions (Collins, ; Hoang, ; Walby, ). Also, by situating the cultural significance of gay sexual labour in Taiwan and framing it as a righteous practice through popularized Buddhist rhetoric of ‘merit accumulation’ ( zuò gōng dé ; Ting, , p. 177), my ethnographic study extends scholarly understanding of societal forces that regulate the male sex industry into underexplored social–geographical locations and sociocultural variations outside a western setting.…”

Producing iyashi: Healing and labor in Tokyo's sex industry

“…Moreover, how male customers in the sex industry imagine the national economy in the global order and their own position within it shapes their desires—and sex workers’ perceptions of these—for particular embodied performances of femininity by sex workers. As Kimberly Kay Hoang () has argued, men's differential access to economic capital within global markets produces competing masculinities that play out in the intimate relations of the sex industry. In Vietnam, for instance, sex workers in four different sectors of the sex industry manifest distinct affective performances to cater to their customers’ aspirations for masculine distinction, whether that entails exhibiting the conspicuous consumption of an ascendant Vietnamese business elite or assuaging expatriate Western businessmen's feelings of failed masculinity (Hoang ).…”

“…At the same time, as Gregory Mitchell reminds us, in contexts of limited labor opportunity, sex workers’ “ability to navigate and perform in the complicated affective terrain of desiring subjects” often entails considerable stakes (Mitchell , 6). In shaping their intimacy and gendered performances around what they assume to be the needs of men who are facing new economic pressures and challenges, sex workers experience in an embodied way the larger shifts in the national political economy (Bernstein ; Hoang ; Mitchell ), as well as, more generally, the exclusion of women from the labor market.…”

“Ducking, diving and playing along”

“…Johansson, 2015) where they then find themselves having to negotiate their erotic subjectivity in unexpected and often harassing ways. In the case of researchers in the field of sex work, especially where this involves sex work in heterosexual contexts, researchers who act as participant observers do not necessarily detail what sex work they themselves actually undertook (Parreñas, 2010;Hoang, 2015).…”