Dirty Talks and Gender Cleanliness: An Account of Identity Management Practices in Phone Sex Work

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to explore, in the context of Italy, the ways in which identity is managed by phone sex operators. Unlike other kinds of sex workers or 'dirty workers' in general who deal with embodied tasks, phone sex operators have no physical contact with clients and face a moral rather than physical taint (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999). Moral taint relates to work that is seen as sinful or of a dubious virtue in respect to the moral order of a given society (Drew et al., 2007). The term dirtiness therefore goes beyond physicality to define what any society symbolises as a transgression or a contradiction of its ordered relations (Dick, 2005; Douglas, 1966).