Health work, not sex work: Situating Asian massage work as healing labour

This piece sketches out how migrant Chinese women massage workers define their massage labour as health work rather than sex work to negotiate the oversexualisation of their labour. Centring migrant Chinese women massage workers’ narratives of how they define their labour, I show how these women understand their healing labour as cultivating health and wellness rather than erotic pleasure, even if clients might experience pleasure. I argue that the impulse to distance such labour as categorically not sex work – in order to gain legitimacy as a worker under gendered, racial capitalism – is both smart and harmful. Drawing on Chinese migrant women massage workers’ narratives, I analyse and push back against moral narratives of ‘proper’ work and workers that affirm a binary view of work as morally just and proper or immoral and corrupt. I ask, why do migrant Chinese women massage workers have to rely on scripts of respectability to receive respect as workers, and what does this say about the nature of gendered, racial capitalism?