In the last decade or so, complementary and alternative medicine generally, and therapeutic bodywork in particular, has been attempting to enhance its professional status and standing. By focusing upon the sex/gender dimensions of therapeutic massage and the wider historical, cultural and legal contexts in which such work is situated, this article explores and analyses the discursive formations and practices which women therapeutic massage practitioners deploy in the course of their attempts to achieve professional recognition. Drawing upon both primary and secondary data, it is argued that particular difficulties pertain in the case of the professionalization of therapeutic massage. Because of the widespread elisions between massage and sex work, women therapeutic massage practitioners have to mark out their professional distance from clients by deploying professional identifications and by using boundarysetting devices or techniques which act to distinguish them from sex workers. This article explores these discursive formations and practices and argues that they act to create near-intractable problems for women massage practitioners. The article concludes that, because these issues are not commonly acknowledged in much of the academic, policy or practitioner-orientated literature, the neglect of sex/gender in the case of therapeutic massage has consequences not only for the professionalization project of this particular therapeutic modality but for the ways in which various body work occupations in which women predominate tend to be seen as marginal and illegitimate 'professions'.

Drawing upon theoretical work which locates the body, sex and sexuality as discursively constituted, this article moves towards a richer understanding of how such discursive formations are mapped on to, and yet simultaneously disavowed in, the narrative accounts of women engaged in sex work and bodywork. Based upon interviews with sauna-and home-based prostitute women and women therapeutic massage practitioners, the article examines those discursive interstices of the self, body, sex and sexuality that firstly, permit similar practices to become constituted as variously embodied and disembodied, and secondly, permit various self/other identifications to be deployed by the two different groups of women. We argue that for both professions, the effects of this are similar; such discursive devices allow the women to repudiate the taint of sex whilst simultaneously allowing them to be publicly re-inscribed as illicit, disreputable and, above all, sexy. This creates near-intractable difficulties for women involved in sex/bodywork.

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This article draws upon research with men and women workers in ‘flat’ organizations, namely mixed‐sex and all‐women's worker co‐operatives and collectives in the voluntary sector. It argues that the denial of sales, contracts and grants to women's co‐operatives and collectives in particular, can be connected to discourses of sexuality generally and to the assumptions surrounding lesbianism and separatism in particular. Such discourses are often used to marginalize women workers and their co‐operatives and collectives, irrespective of whether the women in such organizations are lesbians or not. It is argued that when women workers organize in ways which challenge male‐dominated hierarchy, their marginalization necessarily takes a sexualized form because organizations, whether hierarchical or less/non‐hierarchical, are not only gendered but are also sexualized. This analysis thus offers an important additional dimension to the view that the marginalization of co‐operatives and collectives is due to their small size, lack of capital, location in certain sectors of the economy, or assumptions concerning the ‘alternative’ or ‘fringe’ nature of employment in such settings. This article also argues that sexuality can attach at the level of the organization, and not simply at the level of individual bodies or life‐styles, an argument often unacknowledged both in the literature on lesbians in the workplace, and in the literature on co‐operative businesses and less or non‐hierarchical voluntary sector organizations generally.

FOR THOSE OF US who have been following how lone parents are represented in media and political debates over the last few years, the shift was all too apparent. By Spring 1997, the political scapegoating of single mothers as being responsible for tearing apart the moral fabric of society had become less frequent; tabloid headlines which screamed ‘family breakdown’, ‘scroungers' and ‘welfare benefit crisis' appeared less often; and many politicians had started to project themselves as, at the least, concerned about the welfare of lone parents and their children. Surprising really, that is, until we remember the backdrop—the UK General Election and 1.3 million UK lone parent voters. By April 1997, a growing backlash against the more extreme and pathologising accusations against single mothers had rendered explicit vilification unacceptable. To pull votes a different sort of language had to come into play—one which didn't risk turning off the electorate but would still allow a freezing or cutting of welfare spending on lone parent families. Since it was now politically inexpedient to engage in vitriolic attack, there emerged a new discourse—one which reappropriated and redefined lone parents as chief targets of government aid. Close scrutiny of the texts circulating from 1992 to the time of the General Election offers insights of how policy agendas, political rhetoric and news interweave to construct a definition of lone parents which bears little resemblance to how they may see themselves.