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ABSTRACT
This article examines how socioeconomic conditions impact heteronormative sexual desires between high-end sex workers and low-end sex workers and their clients in urban South China. Drawing both the concepts of dealing in desires and desiring China, the article compares the role of desire between workers and clients in two distinctly different contexts. This study reveals how socioeconomic contexts impact our understanding of what qualifies as reciprocating desires. In particular, the conditions and realities that sex workers and clients in urban China negotiate are recognized and discussed. Ethnographic research with a range of sex workers was conducted in South China from the summer of 2013 to the summer of 2017. In total, 100 sex workers and 150 clients were interviewed in these two niche markets were interviewed. In both high- and low-end sex workers see sex work as a path to individualization which reflects the nation’s accelerated transition to a country of individualized desires.
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Eileen YH Tsang
Eileen YH Tsang’s research interests include the sociology of the middle class; sociology of gender and sexualities; gender, crime and human trafficking. She is the author of Unlocking the Redcloset: Necropolitics, Male Sex Workers, and Tongqi (New York University Press), The China’s Commercial Sexscapes: Rethinking intimacy, masculinity, and criminal justice (University of Toronto Press 2019), The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy (Palgrave 2014). She has also published in The British Journal of Sociology; China Quarterly; Journal of Contemporary China; Higher Education, and Psychology of Violence.