‘The Worst Thing is the Screwing’ (1): Consumption and the Management of Identity in Sex Work

This paper reviews qualitative data from academic research into prostitution, accounts from prostitutes themselves in the UK and Australia, and data from one of the authors' own research in New South Wales to analyse the ways in which female sex workers negotiate and construct their sense of themselves. This analysis is informed by the suggestion that, in the act of commercial sex, the prostitute's own body is being consumed by the client, which can be seen to place certain pressures on the relationship between sex workers' professional and personal identities. Our review suggests that individual workers' tactics for managing the contradictions of working as a prostitute and preserving self‐esteem are both similar and different, even within two broadly culturally commensurable contexts, and, moreover, that not all prostitutes necessarily want to maintain a strict divide between work sex and non‐work sex in every encounter. Moreover, even for those who do, the trials of maintaining the divide are considerable, as is the permeability of boundaries between work and intimate sex.     

Prostitution and fellatio

Questionnaires gathered from men arrested while trying to hire female prostitutes in three Western cities indicate that the desire for fellatio is an important reason clients seek female prostitutes. Respondents were more likely to select fellatio than any other practice when asked which sexual practices they (a) had ever experienced with a prostitute (81% in comparison to 55% for vaginal sex; N = 995), (b) usually experienced with a prostitute (51% in comparison to 12% for vaginal sex, the second most common practice; N = 926), and (c) experienced during their most recent sexual encounter with a prostitute (68% in comparison to 43% for vaginal sex; N = 424). Though a majority of respondents (65%) found the practice of fellatio very appealing, an even greater proportion expressed that opinion about vaginal intercourse (76%; N = 55). These findings, when analyzed in the context of other research on sexual practices, suggest that the desire for fellatio may be one reason some men seek prostitutes.     

Shamans’ Pragmatic Gendered Negotiations with Mapuche Resistance Movements and Chilean Political Authorities

In this article, I look at the ways in which gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct shamans (machi) and the ways in which machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I explore the contradictions between machi’s hybrid practices and their traditional representations of self and why they choose to represent themselves as they do. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, especially machi’s nonideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. Recent anthropological work has focused on the particular historical, social, political, and economic contexts shaping how and why indigenous groups decide to protect and promote particular images of themselves. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved, but on machi’s public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko.     

Visualizing ‘community’: an experiment in participatory photography among Kurdish diasporic workers in London

Most accounts of research methods in academic journals give an impression that research progresses in an orderly, logical and linear manner. Yet, in reality it is often more ‘messy’ than we admit. This paper reports on an experiment on the use of visual photographic methods in a study of Kurdish migrant workers in London who have had problems at work. The aim was to understand the type of problems workers faced and how they attempted to solve or deal with the issues they encountered. We were interested in the extent to which workers looked to local communities for support and if or how their identity impacted on the actions they took. The use of participant‐generated photography developed while the research was in progress and was utilized in addition to individual and group interviews in order to explore if this was helpful (to us and to research participants) in explaining issues, such as identity and ‘community’, which can often be difficult to verbalize or articulate. As a first foray into incorporating visual methods we struggled at first with ways to explain to participants the type of data we wanted, before learning that it was important to ‘lose control’ and allow participants to ‘speak’ for themselves using the lens of their cameras. The paper explores theoretical justifications that influenced our approach in our first attempt at participatory photography. It will look at the use of images constructed by research participants and how these were used in focus group situations to explore how or whether individual meanings of work, identity, community and belonging have resonance in the wider Kurdish community.     

Commodities,merchants, and refugees: inter‐Asian circulations and Afghan mobility

This article consists of an analysis of ethnographic material on Afghan trading networks involved in both the export of commodities from China to a variety of settings across Eurasia and the movement of ‘refugees’ from Afghanistan to Europe. Much recent work on trading networks has deployed the concept of trust to understand the functioning of such social formations. By contrast, in this article I assess the durability of Afghan networks in three ways. First, recognition of how they are polycentric and multi‐nodal. Second, how they are successful in transforming their collective aims and projects in changing shifting political and economic circumstances. Third, how they are made up of individuals able to switch their statuses and activities within trading networks over time. Furthermore, I argue that a focus on the precise ways in which traders entrust capital, people and commodities to one another, reveals the extent to which social and commercial relationships inside trading networks are frequently impermanent and pregnant with concerns about mistrust and contingency. Recognition of this suggests that scholars should focus on practices of entrustment rather than abstract notions of trust in their analyses of trading networks per se, as well as seek to understand the ways in which these practices enable actors to handle and address questions of contingency.     

Portfolios of mobility: the movement of expertise in transnational corporations in two sectors — aerospace and extractive industries

This article is about how UK‐based transnational corporations source expertise and move highly skilled people among their sites. TNCs rely heavily on their internal labour markets for skills. We examine patterns and trends in the ways that TNCs in two sectors, aerospace and extractives, dynamically orchestrate and deploy their networks of expertise internationally to address the demands of different markets. We chart the types of mobility that exist, identify how and why they are used, and explore some of the institutional, industrial, organizational and technological factors that influence these trends. We show that different types of mobility play distinct roles in organizations. Companies respond to mobility calls from diverse stimuli by linking together mobility options into portfolios of moves that represent negotiated responses to industrial and individual requirements.     

What It Feels Like for a Whore: The Body Politics of Women Performing Erotic Labour in Hong Kong

This article seeks to investigate the complexity of the working experiences of female prostitutes in Hong Kong, using an oral history approach. Based on 13 in‐depth interviews, I depict my respondents as performing the skilled emotional labour of sex in exchange for their clients’ money. Looking at the ways in which the women manage the job, the self and the business, I argue that their major problem is not with the commercial transaction (that is, the content of the work itself), nor with the ‘conflict’ between their personal and work selves, but with the social stigma, surveillance and dangers at their workplaces. Inspired by a post‐structuralist conception of power and identity formation, I propose a women‐centred lived‐experience feminist approach in the hope of filling the gap between the bipolar imageries of ‘sexual slavery’ or ‘sex radical’ that have been thrown up in the feminist debate over the meaning of prostitution. This approach emphasizes the inter‐relationships among women’s lived experiences, the micro‐sites of social surveillance and the macro‐condition of wider society. Although Hong Kong female prostitutes are not ‘political’ in fighting for their rights and benefits, they have tended to take the path of micro‐resistance in combating societal domination. They negotiate an identity of the ‘prostitute’ that is sensitive and flexible to different institutional areas that seems to jeopardize the neat binaries of madonna/whore, good girl/bad girl, victim/warrior, conformist/radical. This allows them to create their own space to work and survive.     

Children's narratives of post-divorce family life: from individual experience to an ethical disposition

This article draws on interviews with 60 children and young people to explore how they construct narrative accounts of post‐divorce family life. Rather than seeking to describe children's experiences as if their accounts are simple factual recollections, the focus of the article is on how young people position themselves in their narratives and the ways in which they construct their past experiences. It is argued that these narratives are multi‐layered, often revealing ambivalence and contradictions. The conclusion turns to the question of whether these individual accounts can give rise to what might be referred to as an ethical disposition in which children's experiences can inform a broader social ethos on how to divorce ‘in the proper manner’.     

School-Choice Stories: The Role of Culture

This article uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with the parents of a sample of 88 ninth-grade students from public, private, Catholic, and Christian high schools in two different suburban communities. This research investigates the ways in which parents understand education and how they make sense of schooling options for their children. It shows both how families who choose schools make the selection among various alternatives and why some families seem not to choose schools. This research finds that the financial and information resources of families are not enough in and of themselves to explain school-choice behavior. While these resources are indeed used by families as they make school choices, such measures do not capture the cultural dimension of school choice. In this context culture is understood as the lens through which people make sense of the social world. The decision to activate resources and the direction in which those resources will be activated are mediated by culture. In particular, as these school-choice stories show, the school-choice decision is influenced by the past educational experiences of the parents and by their religious faith.     

Explaining Men's Entry into Female‐Concentrated Occupations: Issues of Masculinity and Social Class

This article seeks to add to an understanding of why some men enter female‐concentrated occupations (and why the majority do not). Drawing on the results of in‐depth interviews with 27 men in a range of occupations, I illustrate and interpret the complex and often contradictory ways in which men approach the notion of working in female‐concentrated occupations and examine the impact that this has on their occupational outcomes. The data suggest that different attitudes to female‐concentrated work cannot in themselves explain men's presence there. Consequently I explore, with particular reference to social class, the context in which attitudes around gender, work and occupational destinations, are framed. I conclude that men's entry to female‐concentrated occupations may best be approached, not as an issue of ‘masculinity’ but as one of social mobility operating within a gendered labour market.     

‘My Mother Thinks that this is the Case,and so Does My Teacher. I,for My Part,Do Not Notice Any Difference’: Methodological Reflections on Intersubjectivity in the Research Process with Children

This article illustrates why the notion of intersubjectivity is important when conducting interviews with children. Even though intersubjectivity is often undermined in educational activity as well as in research with children, it needs to be established and maintained in order to make the children talk and the adults listen. By discussing some interview material from a research project in which children diagnosed with AD[H]D talk about their medication, the authors show how creative the children are when expressing their subjective meanings, and how helpless the adults often are when they do not at first understand the children. Here, intersubjectivity is realised when the adult interviewer manages to understand the children's expressions as their efforts to convey their ideas. Children who struggle to express themselves and communicate need to rely on adults' empathy and understanding.     

Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility,Filial Piety and Care

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.     

‘Who's Got the Look?’ Emotional,Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services

This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The article argues that the current conceptualization of interactive services and sexualized work is partial and blunt; either because it does not adequately incorporate employee corporeality or because it fails to distinguish between the different forms of sexualized work. A better conceptualization is achieved by incorporating aesthetic labour into the analysis, demonstrating how it is extended to sexualized labour employees to have a particular corporate look. From this analysis it is argued that a conceptual double shift is to be needed to understand sexualised labour, firstly, from emotional to aesthetic and sexualized labour and secondly, from an employee sexuality that is sanctioned and subscribed to by management to that which management strategically prescribes.     

The Migration–Development Nexus and Organizational Time

While some migration research looks at how time influences individual migration trajectories, little attention has been paid to the ways in which temporal considerations influence migration and development. We propose the idea of “organizational time” and argue that bringing time into sharper focus calls into question how the categories of migration and return affect organizational change; reveals how the career stage at which migrants leave affects their ability to influence organizational change when they return, and shows how the role of senders and receivers of social remittances shifts over time. We draw on research on the impact of return migration and social remittances on institutional capacity building and policymaking in the health sectors in Gujarat, India to make these arguments.     

New Zealand's turbulent waters: the use of forced labour in the fishing industry

In this article, we make an empirical and conceptual contribution to the emerging debate on unfree labour in the context of labour chains and global value chains. We recast an historical view of poor labour practices aboard some foreign charter vessels fishing in New Zealand's waters as something more nefarious. Applying the International Labour Organization (ILO) and European Commission (EC) operational indicators of human trafficking for forced labour to 293 interviews, we evaluate the extent to which we can consider migrant fishing crew aboard South Korean vessels as victims of forced labour. We find that they are indeed victims of forced labour and that there is a need to extend the ILO/EC operational indicators to take into account exit strategies. Specifically, there is insufficient recognition of deception, exploitation and coercion at the point of exit, which can prevent a trafficked victim from exiting the employment relationship. Thus, it is crucial to take account of all stages, from recruitment to exit, to understand fully unfree labour in labour and global value chains.     

Food or Flowers? Dacha Gardening and Gendered Class Relations in Post‐Soviet Ukraine

The Ukrainian dacha is a rural site where urban residents grow food and relax during the summers, in the process also contributing significantly to households’ food provisioning since the Soviet Union's collapse. This article seeks to understand how gendered class relations shape why people participate, or not, in dacha work. Using ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Komsomolsk, a central Ukrainian town, I examine how people's process of accepting or rejecting the worth of dacha work is both a strategy of navigating market transition and a process whereby they reveal the ways in which age, physical ability, and sense of efficacy factor into whether dacha work is worth their while. These, I argue, are gendered class processes that have been overlooked in dacha research. By taking into account how gendered processes intertwine with class practices, we are able to observe how privileged masculinities reinforce the ideology of market transition, an ideology most evident in agricultural policy approaches favoring fewer and larger food production sites. Moreover, my interactions suggest the dacha enables men experiencing masculinity crises to accrue patriarchal dividends in exerting decision‐making power over their wives.     

Doing disability research in a Southern context: challenges and possibilities

Research on disability issues in countries of the South is primarily dominated by a focus on generating large scale quantitative data sets. This paper discusses the many challenges, opportunities and dilemmas faced in designing and undertaking a qualitative research study in one district in India. The Disability, Education and Poverty Project (DEPP) aims at exploring the role of education in the lives of young people with disabilities living in poverty. A central focus of the research is to engage with the young people with disabilities themselves and to understand how they construed their lives and experiences. This paper discusses three issues which are of central concern to the project: identification of the sample group, appropriateness of the research methods and, finally, an examination of the assumptions underpinning the research process.     

Girls’ Jobs for the Boys? Men,Masculinity and Non‐Traditional Occupations

Occupational segregation by sex remains the most pervasive aspect of the labour market. In the past, most research on this topic has concentrated on explanations of women’s segregation into low paid and low status occupations, or investigations of women who have crossed gender boundaries into men’s jobs, and the potential impact on them and the occupations. In contrast, this article reports on a small‐scale, qualitative study of ten men who have crossed into what are generally defined as ‘women’s jobs’. In doing so, one of the impacts on them has been that they have experienced challenges to their masculine identity from various sources and in a variety of ways. The men’s reactions to these challenges, and their strategies for developing and accommodating their masculinity in light of these challenges, are illuminating. They either attempted to maintain a traditional masculinity by distancing themselves from female colleagues, and/or partially (re)constructed a different masculinity by identifying with their non‐traditional occupations. This they did as often as they deemed necessary as a response to different forms of challenge to their gender identities from both men and women. Finally, the article argues that these responses work to maintain the men as the dominant gender, even in these traditionally defined ‘women’s jobs’.     

‘Where are you from?’: Identifying place1

Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place‐related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passages in focus groups in which participants say where they are from, shows that participants generally take the question and answer as routine, and then shows the ways the interaction develops when this routineness is broken, amended, or called into question. When a participant revises their statement of where they are from, they adapt to what they see as the knowledge and stance of their interlocutor, they re‐present themselves, and they create possibilities for further talk, defending, telling stories, or showing entitlement to an opinion. I argue that the ways people answer this question, interactively, can tell us about them, and us, as well as about their map of the world.