Talk to the Hands that Listen and Care: The Bodywork of Gay Masseurs in Taiwan

• In Event: 306 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Sex Work

Abstract

Research on gay sex work has been slow to feature body as a subject for academic inquiry. While a growing body of scholarship begins to identify the significance of body, the body/mind dualism characterizes much of the existing literature in which corporeal aspects are ebbing away when the emotion comes into play. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 32 Taiwanese gay masseurs, this article focus on how active body to be present in researching the gay erotic commerce. Specifically, derived from the affect turn in body-studies, the author analyses (1) how intended intimacy is embodied and manufactured through the managed hands of masseurs, and (2) how unintended intimacy is inter-corporeally and affectively attuned by intimate touching in which masseurs’ hands have transformed into hands that listen and care. Whereas the former captures the distinct labour processes of gay massage, the latter registers and embodies the multiple-layered inequalities (i.e. body, age, sexuality and economic affordability) that are obscured by the era of ‘happy queer’. This paper contributes to the existing literature by showing how the corporeal and the affective dimension are inseparably in researching gay sex work. The interdependence of affect and body further sheds light on how social, material and cultural processes are lived and embodied in the commodity culture of gay massage where bodies accommodate both transformations and sedimentations as a dynamic relation.

Author

• Bowei Chen, Nanhua University