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Body/sex/work: Intimate, embodied and sexualised labour

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The Body/Sex/Work Nexus: A critical perspective on body work and sex work

Rachel Lara Cohen
Kate Hardy
Teela Sanders
Carol Wolkowitz

Published 2013 in Wolkowitz, C., Cohen, R.L., Sanders, T. and Hardy, K. (Eds) Body/Sex/Work: Intimate, Sexualised and Embodied Work, Palgrave Macmillian,
Basingstoke. Pages 3-27

Introduction

This book focuses on intimate, embodied and sexualised labour in body work and sex
work, exploring empirically and theoretically the labour process, workplace relations,
regulation and resistance in some of the many work sites that together make up these
types of work. It seeks to tease out similarities and differences in the ways that sexual
and physical intimacy are organised, managed and experienced across different
employment contexts and in doing so will provide ways of reframing key questions in
critical studies of work and employment.

Many of the authors in this volume are interested in a particular relation between bodies
and labour, conceptualised as paid ‘body work’ (Wolkowitz 2006, 2002 Twigg 2006,
2000), or, sometimes, ‘body labour’ (Kang 2003, 2010, Cohen 2011), which involves
‘assessing, diagnosing, handling, and manipulating bodies that thus become the object of
the worker’s labour’ (Twigg et al 2011, p.1). Conceptualising ‘body work’ as work on
others’ bodies, and not simply physical and cultural work on one’s own body, which was
its earlier usage (Shilling 2005, Gimlin 2007), recognises the incorporation of body work
(and sex work) within market relationships, and emphasises the role of paid workers in
social reproduction. Concretely, body work is typically found in health and social care,
aesthetic services, for instance beauty work, sex work and protective and security
services, for example nightclub bouncers or airport security personnel, who police and
control bodies. Interactions in body work may take various forms: touch, caress,
manipulation, transformation, arousal or even incision. Cohen (2011) estimates that,
according to this definition, at least 10 percent of UK jobs involve body work (this does
not include sex work, which is rarely measured by labour market data).

Sex work spans a range of activities in which sexuality is explicitly being sold. These are
largely coterminous with customer-facing work within the ‘sex industry’ and include direct
sexual services (prostitution in the form of flat, brothel or street work) (Brents and
Hausbeck 2010), erotic dance (stripping, lap dancing and peepshows) (Sanders et al.,
this volume), pornography (Fazzino, this volume), webcam work and phone sex lines
(Selmi, this volume), amongst others. Much, but not all, sex work involves work on or
with another’s body (and so comprises a form of body work). Therefore, in this
introduction we employ the shorthand body/sex work to indicate work across these
broad, and overlapping categories, reserving ‘body work’ or ‘sex work’ for instances
where we want to specify particularly either work on the body of another or work in the
sex industry.

The focus on the intimate, embodied and sexualised labour that occurs within body/sex
work is part of a new trend toward recognising the embodiment of labour and that the
body, emotions, and sexuality are sites of commodification (Wolkowitz 2006; Witz et al
2003; Gimlin 2007; Hassard et al 2000; Hochschild 1983, 2003; Otis 2011; Hardy et al
2011). The embodiment of occupational cultures and organisational practices has
probably been documented most thoroughly by research on medical, nursing and social
care (for instance ler 1991; Twigg 2006; Twigg, et al (eds) 2011). Meanwhile, Boris
and Parreñas (2010) and McDowell (2009) have carried an interest in embodied labour
and interactions between bodies into our understanding of economic relations and the

geography of employment in private services, including sex work.

None of these books, however, has employment relations or the labour process at its
heart. In contrast, we focus on what we can learn about the social organisation of labour
by considering paid work that takes other people’s bodies as its focus or ‘material of
production’; the inter-subjective relations involved, for example the sexualisation and
desexualisation of work involving, or intimating, touch; and the conflicts and
organisational problems that arise when work involves bodies working on bodies and/or
sexuality.

Workers’ bodies and sexuality are implicated in all labour, but bodies and/or sexuality are
the object of labour in a smaller number of instances. As described below, bodies and
sexuality are peculiar objects of labour due to the social meaning of human bodies, and
the social, spatial and organisational contexts and constraints of the situations in which
they receive attention. The empirical recognition of the peculiarity of bodies as materials
of production has as its corollary the conceptual recognition that labour processes are
always concrete, located and material, in ways that are consequential for the forms of
managerial organisation possible. Additionally, in engaging with types and places of work
that differ from those usually considered in research on the labour process (Thompson
1989; Thompson and Smith 2009) or on the institutional and social organisation of
labour, consideration of body/sex work may provide new avenues for developing labour
process analysis.

Conversely, it is essential that sex work and body work are explored as work – for
instance within a labour process framework – rather than viewing these activities as
fundamentally different from other forms of work, whether as simply extra-economic
oppression (sex work) or ‘natural’ nurturing (other forms of body work). One reason for
the timeliness of this book is the apparent increase in the quantity and visibility of sexual
labour and its consumption (Brents and Sanders 2010), as well as increases in other
forms of body work (especially care work) which have also become increasingly
commodified as paid labour. This book elucidates the lived experiences of those whose
work implies or necessitates sex, sexuality and inter-personal touch and the implications
of this for their experiences of work, temporality, and their ability to organise to transform
their working conditions. We explore the managerial constraints and organisational
pressures of this work and the emotional and aesthetic implications of intimate embodied
interactions for those being worked-upon.

In this introductory chapter, we highlight continuities and differences across a range of
work that has tactile, often intimate or sexualised interaction between bodies at its heart.
These bodies are mostly, but not always, human and mostly, but not always, co-present.
We begin by providing an overview of the changing socio-economic and historical structures
of body/sex work. We then focus in on conceptualizing body/sex work, exploring the embodiment
of service sector encounters, and how this contributes to wider understandings of embodiment at
work, as well as detailing specific issues that arise when workers are engaged in body
work. Next, we consider the ways that workers, located within different occupations and
managerial regimes, adopt strategies for sexualising or desexualising interactions. We
then focus in more detail on the social organisation of ‘body work’ as ‘body labour’ and

the ways commodification affects the labour process of body/sex work. The next section
considers the consequences of commodification for relationships between workers and
those whose bodies they work on. Finally, we explore the impediments that both body
work and sex work present for workers’ capacities to resist exploitation, via appeal to
institutional (especially legal) structures, but also through collective and individual forms
of resistance.

The changing socio-economic structures of body/sex work

People, largely women, have worked on the bodies of others, as well as on their own
bodies for time immemorial. Much of this work (for instance care or aesthetic work as
well as sex work) occurred within the home. Yet, with the radical separation of home and
work wrought by industrialisation and capitalism and the erosion of extended familial care-
networks, new institutions dedicated to the provision of health and social care (hospitals,
asylums, care homes and nurseries) were established, both by private providers and by
emerging welfare states.

In contemporary capitalism, body work is increasingly not simply commodified as body
labour, but located within private, profit-making organisations. This movement has its
roots in several intersecting processes. First, the entry of increasing numbers of women
into paid labour has further reduced the capacity for body work to be provided
domestically. Second, the triumph of neo-liberal politics has meant that many states have
withdrawn from direct provision of health and social care, while the ongoing responsibility
of the state as funder-of-last-resort (for at least a large proportion of health and care
provision) is precisely what makes this a viable market for capital (Diamond 1992).

Third, the growth of the cosmetic, beauty and ‘pampering’ industries has promoted the
development of ever-new aestheticising techniques and ‘specialist’ skills. These have
moved services like hairdressing from kitchens and bathrooms to dedicated salons
(Willett 2000), and increasingly marketed services towards ‘bodies of value’ (Anagnost
2004).

Fourth, a growing cultural acceptance of the commodification of ‘intimacy’ (Zelizer 2005;
Hochschild 2003), has opened up new spaces for capital (especially, as discussed
below, small scale capital). Consequently forms of work previously performed for love are
increasingly performed for a wage (McDowell 2009).

Fifth, socio-demographic shifts as well as cultural expectations have meant that ageing
bodies, particularly, represent an increasing market for goods, services and labour
(Wolkowitz 2012). Partly this involves provision of care, but the market has diversified,
and now involves selling products and body services to reduce visible signifiers of ageing
(such as anti-ageing beauty regimes of Botox and fillers, or, more drastically, facelifts
and other cosmetic surgeries).

Sixth, there has been an apparent growth and ‘mainstreaming’ of the sex industry. The
internet has made pornography instantly accessible, often for free, while table dancing
and gentlemen’s clubs have etched their way onto high streets. Meanwhile in the context

of neo-liberal retrenchment, recession and austerity, more men, women and children
may be turning to unregulated and casual jobs in the sex industry for income and
survival.

Conceptualising body/sex work

Work that focuses on the bodily desires and needs of customers, clients and patients, or
that involves the manipulation or movement of other people, may involve differing
relations to, and social and tactile understandings of, their bodies. Even sex work
stretches from the most intimate sexual exchanges to the, apparently disembodied,
communications of the telephone sex line. Other kinds of work also involve varying
degrees of touch and direct intervention in the body, ranging from the security guard’s
pat-down to the care-worker’s adjustments, and from the surgeon’s incision to the
manicurist’s filing.

Exploration of the labour process of body work/labour (including sex work) places centre-
stage the role of bodies and sexuality within service sector interactions. However, as
Twigg et al (2011) stress, the concept was never intended to displace the concept of
‘emotional work/labour’ (Hochschild 1993). Rather, as Kang (2010) and Cohen (2011)
make explicit, body work/labour is conceived as analytically complementary to emotional
work/labour. Moreover, the recognition that all body/sex work necessitates negotiating
powerful social meanings attached to the body, touch, physical intimacy and sexuality
highlights the intense emotional labour required to manage the bodies and emotions of
patients, clients and customers, as well as workers’ own responses. Because bodies are
volitional subjects (except when unconscious) body/sex work necessarily involves
communicative as well as bodily interaction with clients, customers and patients to get
the work done, even when forming a relationship is not the aim (Toerien and Kitzinger
2007). It can also involve a variety of ways of conceptualising the body-worked-upon, for
instance the mindful body of alternative and complementary therapies, or the more
objectified body typical of modern medicine.

The lack of attention hitherto paid to the extent of service sector employment now
focusing directly on the human body is surprising. One reason for this inattention may be
the apparent continuity of this work with women’s unpaid labour, which means this work
is not consistently recognised as labour. Indeed, as Stewart (this volume) shows, neither
care work nor sex work is fully recognised in UK law as employment. The concentration
of workers seen as outside the ‘mainstream’ labour force (women and racialised, often
migrant minorities) in body work occupations contributes to the marginalisation of this
work and increases workers’ vulnerability. Even where body work, such as hairstyling,
requires dedicated training and skill acquisition, the line between domestic and
workplace social relations may remain fuzzy (Cohen 2008), again undermining
recognition of this work as labour. Furthermore, workers themselves, in discussing their
work, may obscure its bodily content in an attempt to professionalise their image by
privileging the intellectual and affective aspects of their work over what is frequently seen
as the stigmatising ‘dirty work’ of physical intimacy (Bolton 2005,Simpson et al 2012;
Twigg et al 2011).

Body work is also relatively invisible because the places where it is performed are
frequently out of view, in the informal sector and/or outside our understanding of ‘the
workplace’: for instance in workers’ or recipients’ homes, ‘behind the screen’ (ler
1991) in hospital, or, in the case of sex work, in criminalised locales. Finally, the difficulty
in standardizing work on the human body, and the labour-intensive nature of the work
mean that much body work is incompletely subsumed under capitalist labour processes,
and, with the exception of conventional health care, tends to be located in relatively small-
scale enterprises in which self-employed workers bear the costs of the ‘flexibility’ it
requires (Cohen 2011, Sanders, Cohen and Hardy, this volume).

Because frontline body/sex work is centrally concerned with touch skills are in large part
haptic (Miller and Brents and Jackson, this volume; Tarr 2011; Harris 2011). As such
much training is (literally) hands-on, with on-the-job training the norm in fields as varied
as medicine and hairstyling. The level of skill assigned to particular parts of the labour
process is of course not static but shifts with technological development or the
development of new disciplines and associated values, such as the shift from feeding to
nutrition (see Rodeschini this volume). In addition, while we have focused on body work
on human bodies, as Miller (this volume) shows, there may be important parallels in work
that involves working with and on non-human or animal bodies, specifically in terms of
the haptic learning involved.

Investigating the social organisation of body/sex work builds on recent concerns with
‘embodying labour’ (Wolkowitz and Warhurst 2010), explicitly recognising the bodily
basis of human effort and consciousness. Despite the centrality of embodiment to the
labour process—and the incorporation of embodied experience in many ethnographies of
work — the dominant tendency hitherto had been to understand the body as a biological
constant, which can be bracketed away. Conversely work was understood as impersonal
activity, with bodies, emotion, sexuality and even one’s physical attractiveness restricted
to the province of private, family life and associated with women rather than men (Gimlin
2007).

Yet understandings of the body have long been embedded within critical understandings
of work. For Marx the body constitutes both the source of labour and, as an artefact of
labour, its product (Scarry 1985), while, as Foucault (1977) showed us, the operation of
power requires bodies, operating in terms of surveillance, excitation and repression.
Others have suggested that flexible, self-regulating bodies lie at the heart of post-
industrial society, supplanting the defensive, unbending body of industrial society (Martin
1994,). Research into work and employment is now increasingly engaging with ‘body
studies’ and the debates around modernist, postmodernist and feminist
conceptualisations of bodies and embodiment (e.g.Butler 1993, Crossley 2001, Shilling
2005), and usually see bodies as both material and constructed through multifarious
discourses, inscribed upon and inscribing and therefore culturally and historically
contingent (Evans 2002).

Theorisation of the body in the literature on sex work has been somewhat more overt,
since representations of the sex worker appear to be wrapped up more closely with her
body than is the case for other workers (Wolkowitz 2006, O’Neill 2001, Hardy, this

volume). Wolkowitz (2006) argues that different approaches to sex work explicitly or
implicitly deploy different concepts of the body, which underpin different understandings
of the meaning of sex work in contemporary societies and sex workers’ agency
(something elaborated on by Hardy, this volume). The role of the body in sex work is
highlighted in Brents et al’s (2010) account of working in the Nevada brothels, a topic
extended by several chapters in this book (see Brents and Jackson, Cheung, Hardy,
Fazzino, Sanders, Cohen and Hardy and Selmi).

It does not help that analysis of sex work continues to be stuck in the ‘sex wars’ (as
noted by Hardy this volume). Thus notwithstanding research which highlights the
complexities of voluntary adult sex worker-client relationships, media and social and
criminal justice policy continues to construct the customer or ‘punter’ as an untrustworthy,
dangerous and potentially violent offender (Kingston 2010).

However, most theoretical writings and empirical research on the body, sex and work are
primarily concerned with the body of the worker, for instance the worker’s body as the
bearer of labour power (Marx), the target of power (Foucault), or the embodiment of
‘distinction’ or other forms of social hierarchy (Bourdieu). The attempt to ‘embody’ labour
has not, however, yet told us as much about the relation between bodies in the
workplace. While there is research on the embodied relations between workmates or
members of organisations (which features in Halford et al (1997) and other research on
gendered organisations), this is rarely extended to explore embodied relations between
workers and the customers, clients and patients with, and on whom, they work. In looking
at the interaction between workers’ and these bodies-worked-upon, including the ways in
which this interaction is sexualised or desexualised, we need to consider the role of
customers, clients and patients as embodied, wilful subjects, and at how their bodily
vulnerability, variability, and unpredictability affects the organisation of the work and
workers’ relation to the labour process, along with the sensory nature of this relationship,
which (as evocatively evidenced by Cheung, this volume) involves touch, taste and smell
as well as visual and aural interaction.

Sexualising Bodies, Desexualising Bodies

Critical investigations of the role of sexuality in labour, within and beyond the sex
industry, have demonstrated the ways in which sex is increasingly central to multifarious
forms of work (Wolkowitz 2006; Brewis and Linstead 2000; Adkins 1996; Boris et al.
2010) not least sex work (Hardy et al. 2010; Bernstein 1999; Day 2007; Charusheela
2009). Body work involves confronting the sexual meanings of the body and therefore
always involves sexualisation/desexualisation. As such it requires the management not
only of the bodies that comprise the material of labour, but also workers’ own bodies. As
an important component of work that cuts across different forms of body work, within and
outside the sex industry, processes of sexualisation and desexualisation in body/sex
work is discussed below.

In sex work, workers construct a sexualised body/self through aesthetic labour, both to
produce a particular body image and form and also to dress it ‘appropriately’ (Pilcher
2012; Fazzino, Brents and Jackson, Hardy this volume). Depending on the specific

labour process, this sexualised presentation often, however, goes much further to
develop a complex ‘manufactured identity’ (Sanders 2005), providing, for example, a
‘girlfriend experience’ (Sanders, 2008; Bernstein, 2007). The importance of the
sexualised persona becomes particularly evident amongst sex workers who are unable
to utilise aesthetic cues, for instance those engaged in phone sex work (Selmi, this
volume). And, while the sexualisation that occurs in instances such as phone sex could
be understood as disembodied, in order to ‘sell’ the illusion it is critical that a sexualised
body is verbally constructed and narrated.

Beyond the sex industry, as workers’ bodily presentation and aesthetic representation
are systematically incorporated into consumer landscapes, sexualisation becomes
increasingly common across the service sector (Warhurst and Nickson 2009). While
workers’ sexualisation may be part of a resistant or informal worker strategy (Warhurst
and Nickson 2009) it is also harnessed and organised by management across retail,
hospitality and leisure environments, with services marketed on the ‘sexiness’ of staff (for
example, Hooters or Abercrombie and Fitch). Management control operates via the
recruitment of ‘certain personalities’. Notably these ‘personalities’ are then most
frequently employed within relationships in which their income is dependent on tips
(restaurants, bars) or commission (sales), providing workers with a material incentive to
sexualise their workplace interactions. Such employment relations shift risk and
responsibility for pleasing clients to the worker, thereby facilitating a highly sexualised
working environment, while enabling employers to avoid the punitive constraints of
equalities legislation. In this sense there is a parallel between these sexualised leisure
services and workers in the sex industry, who are largely employed as either self-
employed own-account workers or are dependent on …