Ethical intimacy: Relational work of male sex workers in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article examines the boundary work of ethics in same-sex relationships between sex workers and clients in Hong Kong, a neoliberal cosmopolitan city that decriminalized homosexuality in 1991. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork between August 2019 and June 2020, I investigate the changing same-sex relationships between masseurs and clients in and outside gay massage parlors in Hong Kong. From in-house payment for sex to different off-premise gift exchanges, masseurs and clients transition from a market economy as sex workers and clients to the moral economy as real-life romantic and business partners. I build on Viviana Zelizer’s theory of relational work to examine how various forms of intersections of intimacy and economy are made ethical at different stages of masseur–client relationships. A historically contingent form of ethical intimacy emerges from the same-sex sexual economy as a queer response to socioeconomic inequalities in neoliberal Hong Kong.