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Navigating Insider-Outsider Relationalities with Sex Workers in China’s Sex Industry

Updated: Nov 21

Jo Krishnakumar

 

In Out of Place: When Studying China’s Sex Industry, Margaret Boittin details her experiences as a person “out of place” in three spheres—as a “foreigner” in China, as an outsider to the Chinese sex industry that she is studying, and as a peripheral entity in academic spaces that do not treat feminist/gender studies as serious lenses of analyses. She evidences this outsider-ness through detailed anecdotes on how she navigated having access to information precisely because she was an outsider, an identity she eventually learnt to take in her stride as a strength rather than a weakness in all three spheres.


As a similar insider-outsider working with sex worker-led collectives in India, I have navigated being a “native” researcher from South India, being an insider as a queer/trans activist, and an outsider because of my lack of lived experience as a sex worker. For this reason, I related to the navigations and conversations that Boittin had with her interlocutors, almost as if they were memories from my own fieldwork.


Disciplines like anthropology and feminist studies have long debated the dichotomy that researchers seem to cradle—of the insider and the outsider—each positionality bringing with it varying degrees of access, and relationality, but also harm. In this chapter, Boittin brings to the fore some of these debates in the context of sex work in China, tip-toeing multiple roles and acts while on the field. This essay is a response, and a provocation, jumping off from the work Boittin presents, especially to think of how positionality and relationality (Günel and Watanabe 2023) work in real life, on the field, and more importantly when the researcher enters multiple power dynamics with both people who place them on a pedestal and those vulnerabilised in their daily lives. As a researcher working with sex workers, trans and queer communities over the past ten years, my personal practice has centred on trying to question power relations in the field and create a safe environment for my interlocutors. Thus, a lot of my meanderings in this response essay are on how we can situate ourselves as researchers, how research(ers) is/are received and understood, and how to approach research through a lens that reduces harm rather than accentuating it—not just for already harmed communities, but all people we research with, including other researchers.


The Researching Self and the Researched Self: Notes on Positionality


As her method of inquiry, Boittin spent nineteen months on the field in ten Chinese provinces, observing, interviewing, and shadowing sex workers, public health workers, and police officers, giving out condoms and educational pamphlets. This moment(s) of moving from the outside to the inside could be a piece of its own that I would love to read: how did the outsider find their place in the beginning? What were those starting conversations like? How is the self translated and interpreted through language, behaviour, and the first time researchers initiate contact with their interlocutors in new spaces?


I find this especially important not only because “entry” into a community is itself how power relationships start getting navigated, but also an important aspect of the ethnographic research that Boittin is doing. It is in this ethnographic moment that someone becomes, from an entire stranger to one known to the community. This knowing is an experience that involves many ins and outs, negotiations, challenges, a penduluming of knowing and not knowing, even involving an aspect of play as people learn to be, and in a way, trust one another as they build a rapport—a word more and more taken for granted as we think and share less about how this rapport comes about. In terms of the specific community she is talking about—sex workers in the Chinese Sex Industry, brothel owners, police persons, NGO workers—this rapport and trust-building process becomes even more important to consider, not because these interlocutors are different or more challenging than other interlocutors, but because sex workers, who Boittin has chosen to include in this research, are populations already harmed by ethnographic research (Murray, Oliveira, and Dutta 2018). I don't mean to say that she shouldn't have included them—a story about the sex industry should forefront sex workers’ experiences above and beyond other experiences, especially since sex workers themselves do a lot of work, both research-based and not documenting their work. However, even though the author doesn’t claim it, we are currently in an academic/social system where working with the marginalised or “those on the fringes” is flaunted as “better, grassroots research” and also proposed as a “decolonial method”; and I find that this happens without much consideration of whether we are adequately challenging power and social hierarchies ourselves as researchers or if we only find our place in research to be documenters. These positions become especially challenging when working with people not only harmed by research, but by policies born out of research, including meta-narratives, epistemic hierarchies, and global funding politics affected by researchers (Krishnakumar 2024). [1]


I am particularly interested in how introductions work—precisely because the entry is never just an entry—it is the beginning of a relationship that changes the way the community and the people who make the community (researcher included) will experience the world. In my case, it took me years of working with multiple collectives in India to be considered an insider, and yet I am still an outsider for many reasons. I continue on, in what I describe as a spectrum of outsider and insider, depending on the person and collective I was working with, giving me access to different amounts of information, contexts, projects, and stories. Talking about this brings to life the field as we know it, instead of imagining it only as a world unmoved. Before the researcher and after the researcher, the world continues to move and have its own conversations on insides and outsides. The researcher is after all relational—we are as much researched by the communities we work with as we seek to research them, and the roles in the end are not as fixed as they seem to be.


Further on, Boittin uses ethnographic anecdotes to describe an “in-between-ness” that is experienced among multiple interlocutors as she navigates being an outsider who is of “use” to multiple interlocutors. In this way, she opens up an interesting thread of thought on how the researcher-researched dichotomy is often blurred as information and abstract emotions like respectability and social standing are exchanged. I really enjoyed these aspects of the chapter—they could be further developed using a class-gender-race framework, as what the reader is still left wanting to know is how Boittin’s way of dress, the colour of her skin, her English tongue, and her gender presentation gave her access to these spaces. I would appreciate a little more analytical depth in the way Boittin is perceived, beyond solely as a foreigner, as there are many layers even to that foreignness. For example, it is interesting that Boittin was asked to teach children English—this is a characteristic of Western foreignness and imperialism where English as a language has been held in higher regard than other local languages. Similarly, Boittin goes into little detail about how she, a woman, is perceived within the brothel, which I would argue is still an easier perception to notice and battle, since the Madonna-Whore complex already places her as a “good woman” who has entered a “bad place”, bringing with it its own judgements and moral impositions. I want to know more about how the author navigates these spaces in which white women are more protected than others (Doezema 2010), especially since she has chosen to work in a place where she is markedly different and perceived as such. The author at another point talks about authoritarianism that she has to navigate during research, but here too, this analysis could be broadened to think about the risks sex workers face in talking to her as a researcher, which I think is an important detail when talking about the insider-outsider relationship.


The suggested race-gender-class analysis will also help the author push forward other anecdotes on the violence researchers face. For example, in a feminist NGO the author was working at, the author argues that she was victim-blamed (and by extension, slut-shamed) for being a Western woman. However, I contend that victim blaming occurs to women regardless of them being Western or in this case, white, and this anecdote has the potential to have questioned the double standards of feminist organisations beyond the western-eastern archetype to include how the author, working with sex workers, is able to analyse how slut/victim blaming and shaming is levied against women who are placed on the opposite end of the spectrum of morality—the sex workers she works with. It would then also be an opportunity for the author to share some of the solidarity the sex workers need in terms of how she may be treated by the same feminist organisations who moral-police the white, western researcher. Of course, one can argue that categories are self-limiting, but in this case, the author’s positionality is seen in such a way that she has access, and is experienced as a white-woman-researcher, along with the epistemic privilege researchers from the Global North have accumulated (Paramanand 2022). Separating identity from research is not a privilege all researchers have, and while researchers can separate themselves (if they so wish) from identity categories, it is important to notice, understand, and analyse how identities are experienced (differently, often) based on the hegemonic power some identities tend to hold over other identities that make academic debates very different from real-world experiences.


The author further claims that the Chinese use the West and Westerners as a singular category, but does not provide context on how the West has similarly historically seen “the East”, East Asia, and China increasingly as singular un-nuanced categories, leaving a cultural and historical gap in perception. All of these points are a response to focus a little more on who the researcher is, and who she is perceived as when she is in the field. Throughout this section, I have used different points of departure from Boittin’s analysis that offer us an opportunity to think about how researchers can strengthen their analyses when it comes to research relationships and interactions—not just based on identity and positionality, but also power, which would provide not only a stronger base of understanding the researcher-researched relationship and its porousness, but also encourage research relationships that are relational, human, and centred on care. There is, arguably, an outsider who is proper, and invited, as compared to an outsider who, because of the “wrong” class, gender and racial presentation will not be as easily invited into the spaces Boittin has easier access to—and I invite more researchers to consider this difference in perception.


On Language and Meanings


There is a gap in how the author understands what she names “prostitution” and what she understands as “sex work”, given that sex workers have actively asked researchers and journalists to stop using the word “prostitution” when they mean sex work (Stella 2013; Lister 2017). The ambiguity that surrounds the usage of these words has real-world implications for workers, collectives, and unions who work hard to shift the narrative. For example, the author takes for granted words like “pimp” which she uses without more context on why someone is understood as such. Sex work researchers (for example, see Bee 2020; Davis 2012) have called to have working definitions of words like “pimp” so that some of the ambiguity attached to the word are cleared and it is not used to criminalise and incarcerate family members/partners/other sex workers who seek to protect the worker. There is, thus, a lot of potential here to push the analysis to address how some of these terms are taken for granted, instead of using terms introduced from a Western framework without questioning the moral implications they carry, how they are used in a local context, what the power dynamic there might be, and how interlocutors interpret and use the word in different settings (everyday, among the police etc). In my experience, I also had to change the language I understood sex work with, given that in the local context, women used both sex work but also dhandha (meaning business), laingik kaamgaar, or laingika thozhilaali (the Hindi and Malayalam translations for sex worker respectively). The words we use to define and translate experiences thus weigh on how something is spoken about, experienced, and eventually, communicated globally.


There are some ambiguities in the chapter that I would push further to ask why the author chose to do certain things on the field and how meanings and language for different audiences (the police, sex workers, NGO workers) shift, which will further support an argument of not only positionality but also more easily contextualise some of the anecdotes offered to us in the chapter. For example, when she realises that the police officers believe that sex work is legalised in “the West” and therefore women there are free to do as they want, she decides to tell them that this is not, in fact, the case. This interaction stood out to me because she explained that the police officers looked to her for status and validation, which put her in a position of power to inspire change and promote a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by sex workers whom the author and the police officers interact with. This could have been a moment where the author could be more reflective on how such interactions can further criminalise sex work and render sex workers vulnerable in China.


The author further claims that the sex workers did not tell their colleagues their vulnerabilities, but we know from multiple ethnographies about China (and Hong Kong where a lot of sex work activism with Chinese sex workers is based) that this is not true (for example, see Choi 2011; Tsang 2017; Lim 2008 and countless case studies from across Asia); sex workers, while they compete with each other, have been collectivising around the world to create safer spaces for themselves and actively discuss violence, joy, clients and more to keep each other safe. If at all, not talking to each other about their vulnerabilities, it could be argued, is behaviour prevalent in all of Chinese society that the sex workers are a part of, rather than a behavioural facet of Chinese sex workers.


Further, the author at some point alludes to empowerment and care but doesn't in these specific instances describe to us how that care works, but instead tells us about pain—thus falling back into a familiar cycle of how sex workers are spoken about in academic research. There is also a marked difference in the way the police and sex workers are talked about in the piece, which offers us another point of discussion on interlocutors’ voices when abstractions are made in ethnographic pieces—how do we ensure all interlocutors speak through the ethnography, rather than remain silent observers even in writing? While this question is important for all research, it is of particular consequence when we talk about sex workers, who as I mentioned earlier, have faced decades, if not more, of epistemic violence and researchers talking over, or about them rather than with them.


Beyond Insider-Outsider Binaries


In the conclusion of the chapter, Boittin brings together the different spheres where she felt out of place, noting how feelings of discomfort eventually started shifting to comfort—both on her side and her interlocutors’. Boittin also describes a feeling of strain and tiredness that comes out of this forced discomfort and being an outsider in the country, in the subject of work, and in multiple academic spaces that I resonated deeply with. While Boittin claims towards the end of the chapter that all the work on sex work is in gender and feminist theory, I would contend that this increase in response from gender/feminist theory over the past decades is a response to the lack of work over decades on sex work beyond the ambit of law, public health, victimology, and criminology. Indeed, this is the reason why I myself took upon an anthropological study on sex workers’ collectives and daily understandings of activism and care. Sex workers across intersections, their families, and their clients are inherently tied to the law and legal systems (decriminalisation/legalisation/criminalisation) no matter where they are situated in the world, and so it is not surprising that many studies come from a legal perspective. Moreover, in the academic sphere, Boittin fails to talk about how being an outsider (non-sex worker) talking about sex work is seen in a much more positive, objective light as compared to if one has lived experience of sex work, in which case it creates a stigma by association (see Hammond and Kingston 2014).


Arguably, some aspects of being an insider, or outsider are easier to talk about, and since the author ventures into talking about how she is treated as an outsider in research environments, it is a critical moment in feminist writing then to talk about who is left out (even more violently, often) for this piece to serve as a point of political departure. The piece, if decentering whiteness and not taking it for granted, can move towards a compelling intersectional commentary of place and meaning-making by the researcher and her interlocutors in an authoritarian regime—since it is often in places where people feel most suffocated, that creative ways of surviving emerge.


Author’s Note: Find out more about Chinese Sex Workers organising through Sparrow’s Wings Coalition Network (Ally-led network in London), Zi Teng, and Butterfly (Toronto).


End-Note


[1] Jo Krishnakumar, ‘Playgrounds of Resistance: A Patchwork Ethnography of Sex Workers’ Sociopolitical Collectivisation in South & West India’ (PhD thesis, SOAS University of London 2024).

 

Jo Krishnakumar (they/them) is a writer-activist with expertise in participatory, feminist, and ethnographic research. Their work explores cooperation, identity, care, and kinship within sex workers' activist networks, focusing on intersections of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and economy. Grounded in anthropology, Jo's research intersects with social movement studies, visual media cultures, and participatory development. They contribute to open-access projects like Almaarii (a visual anthropology of South Asian queer closets) and Trans/form (focused on anti-trans violence in India). Jo also works with Mithra Trust in Chennai, facilitating mental health workshops using narrative therapy. They are a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a Junior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS).


Feature Image: Durba Sen, Eruptions.


This is part of a book round-table on Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (CUP 2024). Read the other posts here.

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