Negotiating Intimacies in an Eroticized Environment: Xiaojies and South China Entertainment Business

Abstract

This paper draws on the experience of a group of xiaojies (female sex workers) in the Pearl River Delta region (PRD), South China, to discuss how marriage and intimate relations exert a long-term ongoing influence on these women’s rural-urban migrations and work choices, and how the highly developed sex industry in the coastal region poses difficulties, as well as creates opportunities, for them to rethink what they want in their intimate relations. Without legal identity, or economic, social and cultural capital, and bearing prostitute stigma, they can only accumulate resources from the most mundane and trivial acts - yet these yield life improvement only in a superficial way. Nevertheless, this boosts their self esteem and brings positive emotions. The sex business is a “special” kind of business that is based on mutual monetary (material) exchange, and yet involves a lot more than that. It is a nexus where morality, emotion, gender relations, social, cultural and economic redistribution, human rights, legislation, regional development, etc., are interwoven to influence the experiences of the people involved, and the whole social milieu that sustains it. This paper also shows some of the special features of the sex industry, using cases in the PRD as examples.