Bodywork Boundaries: Power, Politics and Professionalism in Therapeutic Massage

Abstract

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'.

Conceptualising Body Work in Health and Social Care

“…Health care practitioners also, wittingly or otherwise, discourage interactions and requests for help from patients through their body language (Halford and Leonard 2003). Practitioners of complementary and alternative medical (CAM) usually articulate a more equalitarian view of practitioner-patient relations than those in allopathic medicine (Oerton 2004, Sointu 2006), but it is not by chance that their health care practices do not generally require the infliction of pain or the immobilization of the patient, so that the micropolitics of their interactions rarely challenge the equalitarian ethos.…”

Biceps, Bitches and Borgs: Reading Jarhead’s Representation of the Construction of the (Masculine) Military Body

“…Empirical data from the sex industry, for instance, clearly indicates that women workers have to become very physically skilled (in fellatio, say) as well as needing to look like "real women" -carefully made-up, slim, toned, tanned (eg, Brewis and Linstead, 2000;Sanders, 2005;Kong, 2006;Mavin and Grandy, 2011). In contrast, Oerton"s (2004) therapeutic massage practitioners strive in their workplace dress, bodily demeanour and hands-on practice to present as emotionally literate professionals and "pure and untainted" by any discursive associations with sexual massage (page 555). Elsewhere, Tyler and Abbott"s (1998) female flight attendants are frequently weighed during grooming checks -their male colleagues are notapparently to ensure that they literally embody their occupation; and Pettinger"s (2005) retail assistants must "manifest particular forms of gendered embodiment … according to the brand strategies of the organization they are employed in" (page 460).…”

Transient craft: reclaiming the contemporary craft worker

“…Originating from research on care work and nursing (see LeeTreweek, 1997;Twigg, 2000), it embodies feminized notions of caring and attending to the body. While the boundaries of what constitutes bodywork are somewhat fluid (see Twigg et al, 2011) the concept has been widened to include sex-work (Sanders, 2005), alternative therapy (Oerton, 2004) and beauty treatments (McDowell, 2009).…”