Asian massage work as erotic healing: Performance (auto)ethnography within Red Canary Song

This article examines the ways in which Asian massage workers and their allies practise Asian massage in everyday life and how notions of Asian massage can be versatile in different spaces based on the cultural and political agency of workers and allies. With methodological exploration in erotic power and healing in feminist studies and the author’s community-based performance (auto)ethnography, the research proposes a theoretical framework of ‘erotic healing’. This framework affirms the multifaceted care and pleasure that workers offer, demonstrating their profound and capacious feelings around massage and sexual practices beyond a means of economic survival in the capitalistic system. Through erotic healing, Asian migrant massage workers and allies can create diasporic and feminist spaces against the misrepresentation of Asian migrant massage work in anti-migrant sex work and trafficking regimes.