Ethnography in a “Sexy Setting:” Doing Research in a New Zealand Massage Parlour

Abstract

At its best, ethnography has the power to richly communicate the complexity of human experience. This chapter traces ethnographic strategies for researching sex worlds, in particular an approach that draws on an Actor Network Theory (ANT) sensibility. ANT encourages the researcher to privilege both human and non-human actors by tracing webs of relations—following actors and actors’ associations with other actors. My version of ANT offers a different ethnography of sex work, giving credit to ‘things’ such as condoms, sex toys, clothing, towels, and alcohol in the assembling of massage parlour sex work. I highlight the important work of heterogeneous actors in configuring sex work identities often sidelined/ignored in other studies. I argue that by focusing on how human and non-human actors mutually define each other, I avoid reducing my account of sex work to that of dyadic sex worker/client encounters, thereby revealing unexpected forms of power or “ethnographic surprises.”