Navigating Insider-Outsider Relationalities with Sex Workers in China’s Sex Industry

Excerpt: In Out of Place: When Studying China’s Sex Industry, Margaret Boittin details her experiences as a person “out of place” in three spheres—as a “foreigner” in China, as an outsider to the Chinese sex industry that she is studying, and as a peripheral entity in academic spaces that do not treat feminist/gender studies as serious lenses of analyses. She evidences this outsider-ness through detailed anecdotes on how she navigated having access to information precisely because she was an outsider, an identity she eventually learnt to take in her stride as a strength rather than a weakness in all three spheres.

As a similar insider-outsider working with sex worker-led collectives in India, I have navigated being a “native” researcher from South India, being an insider as a queer/trans activist, and an outsider because of my lack of lived experience as a sex worker. For this reason, I related to the navigations and conversations that Boittin had with her interlocutors, almost as if they were memories from my own fieldwork.

Disciplines like anthropology and feminist studies have long debated the dichotomy that researchers seem to cradle—of the insider and the outsider—each positionality bringing with it varying degrees of access, and relationality, but also harm. In this chapter, Boittin brings to the fore some of these debates in the context of sex work in China, tip-toeing multiple roles and acts while on the field. This essay is a response, and a provocation, jumping off from the work Boittin presents, especially to think of how positionality and relationality (Günel and Watanabe 2023) work in real life, on the field, and more importantly when the researcher enters multiple power dynamics with both people who place them on a pedestal and those vulnerabilised in their daily lives. As a researcher working with sex workers, trans and queer communities over the past ten years, my personal practice has centred on trying to question power relations in the field and create a safe environment for my interlocutors. Thus, a lot of my meanderings in this response essay are on how we can situate ourselves as researchers, how research(ers) is/are received and understood, and how to approach research through a lens that reduces harm rather than accentuating it—not just for already harmed communities, but all people we research with, including other researchers.

See the full piece here: https://www.sociolegalreview.com/post/navigating-insider-outsider-relationalities-with-sex-workers-in-china-s-sex-industry