Abstract
This paper explores how men who perform intimate labour negotiate perceptions of themselves and their work through complex intersections of masculinity, proximity and propriety. Its focus is on the ways in which embodied organizational negotiations are shaped by gendered perceptions of bodily propriety in three examples of physically, sexually and/or emotionally intimate forms of labour: male massage therapists; men who work in sex shops; and men working as Santa Claus performers. While ostensibly quite different forms of work, each is shaped by the expectation that a ‘quality’ interaction with customers or clients will be based upon the nurturance of a close physical, sexual and/or emotional bond between the service provider and recipient, at the same time as maintaining appropriate bodily boundaries and professional distance. Mediating both imperatives requires a careful negotiation of being appropriately close while at the same time understanding that social perceptions of their work, themselves as workers, and their interactions with customers and clients mean that they are frequently under heightened scrutiny, requiring constant vigilance on their part. Drawing on insights from phenomenological writing on embodiment, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception, the analysis considers the ways in which intersections between masculinity, propriety and proximity are perceived and negotiated in intimate forms of labour, reflecting on instances when a touch becomes ‘too much’. It considers what these instances reveal to us about gendered experiences of embodiment within organizations and the importance of perception in understanding embodied negotiations of workplace intimacy.
Introduction
This article considers the ways in which organizations are shaped by gendered perceptions of bodily propriety and the articulation of what Merleau-Ponty (2002) describes as the ‘bodily schemas’ that govern our inhabitation of the social world, and which shape our interactions with others. Specifically, we explore how men working in massage therapy, in licensed sex shops, and as Santa Claus performers negotiate complex intersections of bodily proximity, masculinity and social perceptions of propriety. While ostensibly quite different forms of work, each is shaped by the expectation that a ‘quality’ interaction with customers or clients will be based upon the nurturance of an intimate bond between the service provider and recipient while, at the same time, maintaining appropriate bodily boundaries and professional distance. We argue that all three areas of work require an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries of what is deemed appropriate due to heightened scrutiny resulting from social perceptions of work and gender. It is these perceptions, and their impact on men’s lived experiences of intimate labour, that is the focus of our analysis. The latter is concerned with understanding how men’s experiences of negotiating proximity and propriety in the performance of intimate labour are shaped by normative perceptions of appropriate forms of organizational interaction. We argue that studying the ways in which gendered bodily schemas shape men’s negotiation of proximity and propriety helps us to understand more about (i) the experience and performance of intimate labour within different occupational groups and organizational settings, and (ii) how bodily schemas operate as processes of organization that shape men’s organizational roles and identities.
Our analysis draws on the concept of perception, particularly as it has been developed by Merleau-Ponty (2002), in three interrelated ways. First, perception constitutes the empirical focus of our analysis of the ways in which men’s experiences of intimate labour are shaped by their sense of how they are perceived, and of how social perceptions of gender impact upon their organizational roles and experiences. If, as Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 122) puts it, ‘we are literally what others think of us’, what does this mean for men who perform intimate labour? It is in this aspect of our analysis that we draw on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘body schema’. The latter is introduced in Phenomenology of Perception to refer to the system of social possibilities that both compel and constrain our embodied inhabitation of the social world, and through which bodily boundaries, skills, capacities and ‘dispositional tendencies’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 169) are shaped. We draw on and develop this concept in our reflections on men’s experiences of negotiating social perceptions of appropriate bodily dispositions in and through their workplace interactions. Second, we mobilize perception as a methodological concept, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) account of the phenomenological method as premised upon a commitment to understanding the relationship between meaning and materiality. This commitment underpins our approach to the research, and provides the starting point for our analytical focus. Third, perception is also deployed epistemologically, through our concern to understand how the men in our study make sense of their social world and their relationship to others through their embodied expertise and ways of knowing.
One of the common features across the three occupational groups we studied is the degree to which men have to develop embodied skills in understanding when their touch, or that of their co-workers, customers or clients, becomes ‘too much’, and hence runs the risk of being perceived as inappropriate. At the same time, within a customer-orientated service environment in which the nurturance of intimacy is widely regarded as a significant aspect of the exchange relationship, the men also have to be aware of the organizational value attributed to their touch, and to the importance of maintaining customers’ or clients’ perceptions of appropriate proximity and the provision of a suitably intimate form of exchange. Drawing on Yakhlef’s (2010, p. 409) discussion of the corporeality of practice-based learning, our focus in this aspect of our analysis is on understanding the body as ‘our link to the practical (social and material) world, and [as] the medium of learning and knowing’ within organizations. Given the intimate nature of their work, it is particularly important for the men in our study to know, within their respective organizational settings and roles, when a touch becomes ‘too much’, and the boundary between propriety and proximity is perceptually breached. Men who perform intimate labour have to know how to prevent this from happening – like the medical professionals in Meerabeau’s (1999) earlier study, they have to navigate interactions with their colleagues, clients or customers so as to minimize or eliminate the risk of ‘boundary breaches’; they have to learn how to recognize when such breaches are at risk of occurring, and they have to know how to respond when a perceived boundary breach has taken place. Our analysis emphasizes how their embodied perception is the locus of this knowledge, which itself is shaped by the gendered expectations governing heteronormative masculinities 1 within contemporary organizational settings, shaped by bodily schemas that compel particular performances and forms of interaction while constraining others.
While the extent to which men and hegemonic masculinities continue to dominate organizations has been the subject of considerable critique within management and organization studies (Acker, 1990; Collinson & Hearn, 1994; Kerfoot & Knights, 1998; Pullen & Simpson, 2009), men’s embodied experiences of work continue to be relatively under-researched (Hall, Hockey & Robinson, 2007; Thanem & Knights, 2012). This is most likely attributable to the resilience of a deeply embedded association between masculinity, reason and rationality within organizational settings (Ross-Smith & Kornberger, 2004), with distance from bodily proximity often being taken ‘as a signifier of authoritative expertise’ (Knights & Tullberg, 2011, p. 388) and organizational status. Yet thinking through how masculinities and embodiment interrelate is central to understanding men’s lived experiences of organizations, particularly within service economies in which getting ‘close to the customer’ (Peters & Waterman, 1982, p. 14) is an imperative shaping the performance and management of interactive sales-service work. Continuing to neglect men’s embodied experiences of work, and more specifically the ways in which touch is negotiated within organizations, therefore results in a gap in our understanding of how men have to navigate proximity and propriety, particularly within intimate forms of work.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty (2002), we argue that problems experienced when men undertake intimate forms of work derive from a widely held socio-cultural norm that the capacity to foster intimacy remains predominantly a female disposition. Added to this, organizational heteronormativity means that when men perform physically intimate work, questions of sexual propriety are often raised. As McDowell (2009) observes, within the cultural imaginary men’s embodied performances of work are often associated with violence, muscularity and intimidation, whereas women’s bodies tend to be thought of in terms of care, nurturance and intimacy, as well as deference. Hence, men’s bodies are frequently regarded as signs of power and authority, as well as sites of threat; as Sargent (2004, p. 179) has put it, in the social imaginary ‘women’s laps are places of love, men’s laps are places of danger’. Here we address what this means in organizational terms by considering the following questions: How do men in the three areas of work examined here negotiate perceptions of themselves and their work? How do they experience their bodies at work, and their genders? What can their experiences tell us about how embodied perceptions of masculinity compel or constrain the organizational performances and workplace interactions of men who work as intimate labourers?
The article commences with a discussion of existing research on embodiment, masculinity and intimate labour. We then discuss Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) account of embodied perception, explaining how and why we mobilize various concepts from his writing in order to understand how the masculine working body as a site of complex negotiation of proximity and propriety is experienced within organizational settings. Here we draw on and develop inroads that Merleau-Ponty’s work has begun to make into critical management scholarship in recent years (Dale & Latham, 2015; Hancock, 2008; Küpers, 2015; Riach & Warren, 2015; Thanem & Knights, 2012), especially within Organization Studies (Shotter, 2008; Yakhlef, 2010). This work has begun to shift the analysis of organizational subjectivity towards a more phenomenological focus on how the former is lived, situated and embodied. In this respect, we also aim to respond to calls for insights for phenomenological thinking to be integrated more closely into the analysis of organizational processes and settings (Avenier, 2010; Hassard & Wolfram Cox, 2013; Helin, Hernes, Hjorth & Holt, 2014; Lucas, 2014; Tomkins & Eatough, 2014), particularly in the analysis of embodied experiences of organizational life (Dale & Burrell, 2014; Perezts, Fay & Picard, 2014; Yakhlef & Essen, 2013). Having mapped out the methodological approach that we took to the research, our findings are presented under the three headings of the occupational groups we studied. Finally, we discuss the experiences of gender performance that the men in our study reported, returning to how insights from Merleau-Ponty help us to make sense of the complex negotiation of proximity and propriety that characterizes the embodied experiences men have of undertaking intimate forms of labour.
Masculinity, Intimacy and Embodiment in Organizations
Organizational research on the body as a site of commercial exchange has tended to focus on the commodification of appearance, and particularly on the body primarily as an object of managerial control and professional inscription (Bryant & Garnham, 2014; Hancock & Tyler, 2000; Haynes, 2012; Trethewey, 1999; Waring & Waring, 2009; Witz, Warhurst & Nickson, 2003). This means that touch, proximity and intimacy as more inter-subjective attributes of lived experience have remained relatively neglected, despite the recognition that touch and inter-corporeal intimacy are salient in our understanding of organizational settings and processes (Lawler, 1997; Twigg, 2001). Recent contributions that take this recognition as their starting point have emphasized a more phenomenological understanding of the lived body, drawing on a processual ontology emphasizing embodiment as the connection between subjectivity and the body’s socio-materiality, and developing the latter in their critique of the role that organizations play in situating and shaping embodied experience (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012; Dale, 2001; Dale & Latham, 2015; Riach & Warren, 2015). Yet inter-corporeal touch – direct contact between one body and another – continues to remain relatively overlooked within organization studies, even within these more phenomenological analyses. Where touch is specifically invoked it is often in a metaphorical sense with recent examples including Grint’s (2009) study of how organizational followers are ‘touched’ by charismatic leaders, Lee and Romano’s (2013) discussion of the importance of ‘keeping in touch’ with democratic principles of public deliberation in the formulation of organizational strategy, and Shotter and Tsoukas’s (2014, p. 377) discussion of the ways in which, when making what they call ‘engaged judgements’, managers actively try to be ‘in touch with their felt emotions and moral sensibilities’.
This is not to say that more literal engagements with touch within organizations are entirely absent from the literature, however. One strand of this literature focuses on touch as a medium through which skill, expertise and knowledge is acquired, or through which aesthetic judgement is practised. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005), for instance, argue that expertise based on ‘immediate, unreflective situational responses’ constitutes the foundation of intuitive judgement. Ewenstein and Whyte (2007, p. 689) similarly argue that aesthetic knowledge, emerging from practitioners’ understanding of the look, feel, smell, taste and sound of an organization, is an understudied phenomenon, yet is one that is ‘vital to work in many organizational contexts’. A second strand of literature on touch has emerged from within research on caring work, particularly in educational and medical settings. Several studies have explored how male practitioners in particular navigate gender and sexuality to achieve a clinical professionalism by negotiating social perceptions of the low status and/or connotations of sexual impropriety associated with the embodied closeness routinely required by their work. Rodeschini’s (2013) discussion of geriatric healthcare work highlights the ways in which close proximity to other people’s bodies constitutes a marker of relatively low professional status, while Martin (2002) outlines the difficulties staff in residential care homes for the elderly face when they have to touch soiled bodies, clothing and bedding. Meerabeau (1999) has also highlighted how the need to manage embarrassment, through discretion and privacy, is particularly acute when male bodies are the focus of attention in intimate medical examinations. Here Meerabeau (1999) draws on earlier work by Emerson (1970a, 1970b), noting how the need for a ‘matter of fact’ stance has to be continually balanced against the risks attached to treating the patient as an object, with the latter’s associations with indignity and dehumanization. Villadsen (2009) picks up on this theme, noting that, in order to inject a ‘human touch’ into otherwise potentially alienating experiences, minor transgressions of rules and regulations are often necessary. Meerabeau (1999, p. 1510) sums up the embodied nature of negotiating these forms of transgression during instances involving a male doctor and a female patient:
The doctor must both treat the patient as an object with his hands, whilst acknowledging her as a person with his voice. He may also need to soothe the patient in order to get her to relax, whilst trying to avoid sounding seductive.
Exploring the ways in which medical practitioners desexualize physical examinations, Giuffre and Williams (2000, p. 481) also show how the strategies deployed are guided by norms governing gender performance and sexual orientation. Their study reports how male practitioners tend to use chaperones to guard against possible false allegations of sexual harassment or abuse, while female practitioners routinely do so to protect themselves from male patients. On this basis, they conclude that ‘gender is embedded in the informal organization and daily interactions’ of those who perform intimate labour, but how men and women negotiate the boundaries of intimacy and impropriety in this and other organizational settings requires further study.
Shifting the focus to education, Gilbert and Williams (2008) consider the ways in which representations of touch in teaching materials within early educational settings delineate ‘acceptable touch’ as heterosexual and feminine in a way that actively discourages men from entering the sector. Further studies that focus specifically on the precarity of intimate forms of interaction within other organizational settings, and how these are shaped by social perceptions of gender, include Sanders, Cohen and Hardy’s (2013) research on hairdressing and stripping that observes how, in both areas of work, the intimate physical proximity of worker and worked-upon, combined with the gender relations involved, exacerbates the possibility that workplace interactions may be sexualized. These assumptions are particularly acute in one of the types of work considered below – massage work – for, as Sanders (2005) also notes, historically there are strong links between massage and sex work, and some massage therapists continue to perform sexual services. As Oerton (2004, p. 544) has also highlighted in this respect,
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 boundary-setting devices or techniques which act to distinguish them from sex workers.
What these studies emphasize, particularly in medical and educational settings, is the need to consider in more depth how men working within intimate labour are required to maintain a professional distance; and to consider how this is negotiated in relation to a corollary need, intensified within a service economy, for proximity. They also emphasize the need to examine how negotiating this relationship between professional distance and proximity is shaped, and arguably intensified, by gendered perceptions of propriety within organizational settings and sectors of work in which touch is particularly significant. We examine three such settings in which touch is salient, either because (i) it constitutes the medium of exchange (as in the case of massage therapists), or (ii) because touch is the focus of the transaction, and the goods or services sold are designed to be used during intimate forms of interaction (as in the case of sales advisors working in sex shops, for instance), or (iii) touch is almost unavoidable because of the level of emotional connection associated with the role and physical closeness expected of the encounter, but because of the client–worker relationship, is either implicitly (socially) or explicitly (organizationally) prohibited (as in the case of men working as Santa Claus performers considered here).
Taking insights from these studies as our empirical starting point therefore, our research sought to consider the following: How do men negotiate the delicate and complex boundaries between intimacy and distance? How do they recognize within their respective organizational settings when, for them or their customers, clients or co-workers, a touch becomes ‘too much’? And what can we learn from these moments of heightened self-consciousness about embodied experiences within organizations more generally, and particularly about the bodily schemas that compel and constrain particular bodily dispositions?
Of the relatively few studies focusing specifically on the negotiation of organizational touch, Sargent (2004) provides perhaps the most in-depth understanding of the difficulties men face when attempting to mediate expectations of proximity on the one hand, and propriety on the other. As Gilbert and Williams (2008) argue, while many organizations and professions have ‘no touch’ policies, largely because of a lack of clarity about what constitutes appropriate touch, combined with a fear of accusation, children and adults need touch to develop and sustain mental, physical and emotional well-being. To put it simply, ‘from birth, humans appreciate and value physical touch’ (Fuller et al., 2011, p. 232), 2 yet the potentially affirmative benefits of organizational touch, the constraints shaping forms of interaction that involve touch, and the embodied intimacy of touching or being touched remain relatively neglected themes within organization studies, largely because ‘in many cultures, touch is considered taboo in the workplace’ (Fuller et al., 2011, p. 232). This taboo status is, as suggested above, particularly precarious when men’s bodies are touching or being touched in occupational settings that require the performance of intimate labour.
Distinct from McGuire (2007), who describes intimate work as the informal support that workers provide to each other, we use the term intimate labour to refer to the work required to nurture a close physical, sexual and/or emotional bond within the exchange relationship. Intimate labour is not, therefore, solely emotional, aesthetic or sexualized, but is characterized by a dynamic interplay of all three; in other words, intimate labour is work characterized by embodied intimacy within which the taboo status of touch within organizational settings has to be continually negotiated. Our use of the term therefore builds on Hochschild’s (1983) account of ‘emotional labour’, which focuses primarily on the incorporation of emotion into the labour process, as well as on subsequent studies of aesthetic labour, which focus largely on the commercialization and control of employees’ appearance (Hancock & Tyler, 2000; Warhurst & Nickson, 2007, 2009). It has much in common with what Wolkowitz (2006) has described as ‘body work’, a term she uses to refer to ‘paid work that takes the body as its immediate site of labour, involving intimate, messy contact with the … body, its orifices or products through touch or close proximity’ (Wolkowitz, 2006, p. 8, emphasis added; see also Caccioni & Wolkowitz, 2011). Building on these insights, our use of the term ‘intimate labour’ draws directly on a phenomenological understanding of embodiment as the experience of living in and through the body, developed most fully in Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. From this particular text, we draw on the idea that bodies are socially situated, inter-subjective media through which we encounter the world and others. Intimate labour therefore describes the embodied performance and experience of interactive work in which a particularly high level of physical, sexual and/or emotional form of intimacy 3 is expected, and within which the relationship between proximity and propriety has to be continually negotiated. To understand precisely how a phenomenological understanding of embodiment can help us to know more about the experience and negotiation of this, and how it is shaped by gendered perceptions, we now turn to insights from Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Incursions into Intimacy
As Collinson (2003, p. 527) has noted, western thinking has traditionally conceived of human beings as ‘unitary, coherent and autonomous’. In contrast, a phenomenological ontology connects our objective physicality to subjectivity, emphasizing how as embodied beings we are mutually inter-dependent. In what is perhaps the most significant and substantial account of this, Phenomenology of Perception (2002 [1945]), Merleau-Ponty establishes his assertion that central to human being in the world is embodied perception. As he puts it, in so far as ‘we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body, the body is simultaneously the subject and object of our perception’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 239). Neither a passive reception of the world, nor a projection onto it, perception refers to a dialectical way of being whereby the objective world is brought into meaningful existence only through acts of perception while, at the same time, the perceiving subject is constituted in and through perception of the external world.
Perceiving subjects do not exist in isolation, however. For Merleau-Ponty the phenomenological world is not simply a pre-social given, but rather an inter-subjective social materiality (see Dale, 2005) through which sense is only revealed ‘when our own experiences and those of others intersect, and engage with each other like gears’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. xxii). Furthermore, embedded in this conception of our mutual interdependence is the realization that the locus of any such perception is the body as both the site of subjectivity and the object that physically engages with the external world. As Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 185) expresses it, ‘I become involved in things with my body, they co-exist with me as an incarnate subject’. Underpinning this is a critique of both the primacy attributed to a disembodied cognition and within empiricism, the presupposition that we encounter the world around us ‘fully developed and determinate’ (pp. 5–6). Rather, embodied perception is understood to play a constituting role in shaping reality to the extent that we are only ever ‘conscious of the world through the medium of the body’ (pp. 94–5, emphasis added) as our most basic mode of being in the world.
Central to understanding this is the connection between ontology and ethics in Merleau-Ponty’s writing, one premised upon his post-dualistic view of the body as a medium between self and other; while human beings are embodied perceiving subjects, we are not isolated, self-centred subjects. On the contrary, by virtue of our embodied being in the world, we are embedded within social relations with other bodies, as not only do our bodies provide the location from which perception takes place, they also situate us in others’ perception. From this perspective, therefore, we both engage with the other and are engaged by the other in and through our bodies, and it is the body that provides for not only the possibility but also the necessity of inter-subjective intimacy. In Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ethics, premised upon the post-dualistic understanding of subjectivity outlined above, the latter is not simply a moral obligation but an ontological compulsion; we exist in and through our own bodies but also those of others, because our mode of being, our embodied ontology, means that we can do no other:
I experience my own body as the power of adopting forms of behaviour and a certain world, and I am given to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world; now it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 354, emphasis added)
This phenomenological understanding of embodied subjectivity and its implications for how we interrelate with one another provides an important lens through which to view the lived experiences of masculinity, propriety and proximity as described above, emphasizing three significant themes for our analysis. First is the importance of perception in negotiating subjectivity, and in shaping our performance of who and what we are. If perception is central to human being, then understanding how we perceive ourselves, and how we are perceived by others in and through our organizational roles, identities and interactions becomes crucial to making sense of lived experiences of organizational subjectivity. Yet, as noted above, we know little about men’s experiences of negotiating perceptions of themselves and their work in organizational settings that demand intimate forms of labour. Second, a phenomenological understanding of the body as simultaneously subject and object, and as the site of our encounter with others and the social world, emphasizes the embodied nature of knowledge, including the specialist ‘tacit’ knowledge associated with particular occupations. In other words, if ‘organizational learning is corporeal’ (Yakhlef, 2010, p. 409), what role does embodied, tacit knowledge play in helping men to judge when a touch becomes ‘too much’ and to understand, through sensory knowledge, where that boundary lies, and how to negotiate it? Third, underpinned by a phenomenological embodied ontology is an ethical understanding of the way in which our mode of being in the world necessitates recognition of our mutual inter-dependency. This latter theme is central to our analysis, premised upon what Merleau-Ponty describes as ‘the cohesion of an intersubjective life’, based on a mutual recognition that ‘the experience of each one of us links us with that of others’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 525). This rests, in particular, on an acknowledgement of the importance of proximity in his account of embodied subjectivity and its connection to reflexive, sensory knowledge:
Between the self which analyses perception [the intellectual, knowing, ‘rational’ self] and the self which perceives [the experiential, sensate self], there is always a distance. But in the concrete act of reflection, I abolish this distance. (pp. 49–50, emphasis added)
Shaping our way of living in and through these concrete acts of reflection is what Merleau-Ponty calls our ‘perceptual field’ (p. 18). The latter frames the ways in which we make sense of the world and others: ‘our perceptual field is made up of things and spaces between things’, so that we constitute the world through acts of understanding, but those acts are already shaped by perceptual experiences. What Merleau-Ponty seeks to recover, in his discussion of the perceptual field and the role it plays in shaping our relationship with ourselves and others, is our embeddedness in a perceptually knowable environment in which we invest meaning as a result of our basic openness to the world. The combined ontological-ethical compulsion to be both open to the other and to make sense of the world around us means that, as he puts it, ‘to be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them’ (p. 111, emphasis added). In other words, our very existence is shaped, on the one hand, by a need for openness to ourselves and others based on mutual recognition of our shared, embodied vulnerability (we need other people not just as human beings, but as social beings), at the same time as we are compelled to make sense of the world around us. Hence, for Merleau Ponty, our basic openness is always ‘conditioned by [our] situation’ (p. 71); our perceptual field is always socially situated simply because we always perceive from somewhere. Hence, to be open to the other enough to allow for us to recognize the shared, embodied vulnerability brought about by our mutual inter-dependency is itself always shaped by our own social situation, and that of others.
Conditioned by our social situation, and shaping our perceptual field, is what Merleau-Ponty describes as body schemas – effectively, the social organization of the body into discrete modes of existence through the acquisition of certain ‘dispositional tendencies’ (p. 169). Put simply, the body schema is ‘a way of stating that my body is in the world’ (p. 115), conditioning the way in which we inhabit our bodies as a mediating or third term, between self and other, subject and object. Although Merleau-Ponty discusses the impact of bodily schemas on the ways in which we inhabit the world, the basis of the body schema – what compels and constrains it, for instance, as an organizing mechanism, and the ways in which it is shaped by the particularities of our social (organizational) situation, are themes that are less well developed in his analysis, particularly in relation to gender (De Beauvoir, 2011 [1949]; see also Olkowski & Weiss, 2006), a theme we seek to address in our analysis here by exploring the gendered organization of workplace bodily schemas within three different occupational settings.
Methodology: Researching Men Doing Intimate Labour
Our methodological approach to the research was premised upon Merleau-Ponty’s conviction that our understanding of the world is gained through our situated, embodied experience of it: ‘all my knowledge of the world … is gained from my own particular point of view’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. xviii). In studying the phenomenal field, our methodological task is to reflect on the layers of lived experience through which other people and things come to have meaning for us, or as Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘the system “self-others-things” as it comes into being’ (p. 66). As the locus of our research, this involves moving away from ‘the body as an object’ and focusing instead on the lived body as the site of the knowing self and of making sense of the social materiality within which we are embedded. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘it is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive things’ (p. 216). His discussion of the epistemological implications of this position emphasizes that we can only know the world and others from our embodied situation, so that our capacity to make sense of the world is socially situated. Understanding this requires what he describes as ‘radical reflection’ (p. 254), a reflexive recognition that our capacity to perceive the world, including the organizational world, is grounded in our own embodied experience through which we simultaneously make sense of the world as we bring it into meaningful existence. Methodologically, this requires us to undertake research not on but through our bodies, and to understand how in the nexus of ‘self-others-things’, our bodies constitute media through which the world shapes our socially situated existence, and vice versa.
With this in mind, understanding how gendered bodily schemas shaped the situated, lived experiences of the men in our study required a research design that encouraged critical reflec-tion on men’s awareness of social perceptions of their work roles and settings. In turn, this necessitated a careful reflection on the impact of the broader cultural imaginary – the system of ‘self-others-things’ – within which intimate labour is encoded and embedded. All of the workers in our studies risked the perception of inappropriate exchanges that could potentially have made their respective positions untenable; 4 such risks are not accidental or simply ‘unfortunate occurrences’, but are encoded within the bodily schemas that organize gender so that, as noted above, when men perform intimate labour their motives, identities and organizational interactions come under heightened scrutiny. Learning to negotiate these risks through the development of sensory, tacit knowledge was vital, and was experienced by each of them in a way that emphasized how ‘learning is corporeal … stemming from the body’s perpetual need to cope with tensions arising in the body–environment connections’ (Yakhlef, 2010, p. 409). Understanding how these tensions are experienced, and how relevant boundaries were perceived and negotiated, was a recurring theme in all of the three cases that we discuss below.
Research settings and methods
The cases formed part of larger studies conducted separately by the three authors that were analysed retrospectively. 5 Our methodological approach builds on insights from earlier studies that bring together stand-alone projects and re-examine data to gain additional insights into the working lives of men in various occupations (e.g. Hall et al., 2007; Pullen & Simpson, 2009; Tracy & Scott, 2006). Although our studies asked participants to discuss potentially sensitive subjects around gender, sexuality and propriety, all of the men we interviewed were keen to share their experiences with us, and to reflect on their negotiations with co-workers, customers or clients.
The study of massage therapists was based on observations of a total of 17 classes at two certified-massage schools in the United States spread over a period of 18 months, preceded by discussions with the directors of each, and also 5 in-depth interviews with men (and 12 with women) working as massage therapists, recruited using a snowball sample (Sullivan, 2012, 2014). Therapists’ job tenure ranged from 2 to 17 years; most participants had been practising for between 4 and 5 years. Interviews lasted approximately one hour, with the longest being two hours and the shortest 45 minutes. All interviews were conducted in public places such as coffee shops or the massage therapists’ off-site or home office. Before undertaking the interviews, the researcher completed training in massage therapy and had established network ties with the local chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA). These conditions bolstered her credibility and aided her in securing interviews with male and female therapists. Interview questions covered a variety of topics around gender, sexuality, embodiment and professionalization. As discussed in Sullivan (2014), male massage therapists are felt to be more likely to openly discuss the often-stigmatized nature of their occupation than female participants, and the men who were interviewed appeared to be comfortable discussing their embodied subjectivities and negotiation practices with clients.
Forming part of a larger study, Tyler’s (2011, 2012) research on men working in sex shops involved a series of interviews with 14 people working in licensed and unlicensed sex shops in London, four of whom had managerial responsibilities (one as an area manager), and all but two of whom worked on a full-time basis. Four were women and ten were men, a pattern that seemed broadly reflective of the gendered composition of the workforce in the stores. At 19, Toby was the youngest participant, and Richard, in his late 60s and semi-retired, was the eldest, with a broad spread in between; all were from white ethnic groups (again, both the age and ethnic composition of the participants seemed broadly reflective of a more common pattern). Access to the participants, and to undertaking observational research in the shops in which they worked, was negotiated initially through informal requests and contacts made via emergent participants, and then a snowball sample through which participants recommended one or two others who might be willing to take part. Negotiating access was an ongoing process premised upon a mutual openness and a dialogical approach to the research so that access, sampling and the interviews themselves were often quite informal and improvisational. During the interviews, several participants talked about their heterosexual partners, others described themselves as single, or discussed their bisexual or gay lifestyles and partners during interviews. Several interviews were conducted in local cafes or on public benches, sometimes over several meetings during the participants’ break times or after work, or in the small offices at the back of the stores, but most took place at the sales counter on the shop floor where the participants worked, during working hours or while they were on informal breaks during quiet periods. This meant that (much like Sanders interviews with sex workers that were also undertaken in situ – see Sanders, 2005) the flow of the conversation was often interrupted by customers, or by co-workers. However, it also meant that interviewees were able to talk often very animatedly about their work and their work environments, giving examples, and recalling incidents as something in the shop itself triggered recollections or prompted thoughts that they might not otherwise have had.
Because most of the interviews were undertaken with a tape recorder resting on the sales counter at the front of the shop, and because most of the shops have at least one, and mostly several, screens on the shop floor playing DVDs that are on sale, the majority of interviews were carried out while hard-core pornographic films played on screens next to the counter and at various other points throughout the store. Initially this made for a very self-conscious research experience, particularly if the researcher was the only (other) woman in the shop, but she quickly became accustomed, even immune, to it and this in itself provided an interesting insight into the work experiences of those employed in the shops. As Shirley, one of the four women who took part in the interviews, put it, ‘after a while nothing fazes you, nothing at all, not in this business’. Many of the interviews, even though they were carried out in the shops themselves, continued over a couple of hours, and almost all were at least an hour long, generating rich, detailed and reflexive accounts of people’s work experiences.
Hancock’s (2013) account of men working as Santa Claus performers was initiated by contacting several theatrical and PR agencies that advertised Santa Claus performers at commercial rates, leading to an invitation to attend one such agency’s annual ‘Santa School’, an event that doubled as a training and selection event for experienced and aspiring performers. This resulted in interaction with costumed performers, eliciting agreements for interview and collecting contact details. It became clear during the subsequent interviews that the role was predominantly undertaken, at this more accomplished end of the spectrum, by those with either a professional or semi-professional background in acting or related forms of performance. The next step, therefore, was to post a four-week advertisement in The Stage magazine, the UK publication for members of the theatrical profession, requesting interviews with those who had performed the role, once again in a commercial capacity. These resulted in a total sample of 14 interviews, comprising 13 male performers whose ages ranged between 52 and 81 and one female grotto assistant aged 32. The interviews varied in length from one to two hours. All but two of the performers interviewed had worked exclusively in the UK. Of the other two, one had also worked in the US while the other had worked exclusively in Finnish Lapland. The sample had performed across a range of settings, including department stores, shopping malls, theme parks, corporate and private parties, corporate promotion events and in advertising.
The interviews in all three studies were based on a combination of semi-structured and relatively unstructured, conversational-type interviews. Each of these was professionally transcribed and transcripts were returned to participants for clarification or comment. Conducting fieldwork, and undertaking and analysing the interviews in all three studies constituted an interactive, iterative process that was, on occasion, quite improvisational (e.g. when observational research merged into an impromptu interview, or vice versa). All three studies had in common a concern to understand the embodied experiences of men working in relatively marginal, under-studied occupations, and how social perceptions of intimate labour shape the lived experiences of those who undertake it.
Each of the three authors undertook focused readings and re-readings of field notes and interview transcripts, and used interim findings to inform the next phase of research. While mindful of the need for confidentiality, we were also committed to ensuring that conducting and analysing the interviews were as integrated and inter-subjective as possible, aiming to produce a dialogical account of the themes that emerged (Lorino, Tricard & Clot, 2011; Shotter, 2008). Categories of meaning such as perceptions of labour and propriety, embodied negotiations and proximity emerged that informed our discussions with research participants, and later with each other, and we drew on these as we re-read our data for comparative purposes, identifying commonalities and contradictions both within and across the three studies retrospectively. Following Miles and Huberman (1994), data analysis in all three cases involved a process of open coding in order to allow the data to be organized and categorized in line with a combination of theoretically pre-indicated concepts emerging from the literature discussed above, as well as emergent analytical issues, in order to identify recurring themes and patterns, including connections and contradictions in our respective studies. The main analytical themes that emerged through this process coalesced around a focus on embodied experiences of the need to constantly negotiate customer and client expectations so that a close bond would be nurtured, at the same time as being acutely aware of the need for professional propriety. This was found to be especially intense in the case of men performing as Santa Claus, for whom most of their exchange relationships were with children; but for all of the men in our study, constant vigilance regarding their gendered presentation of self and their interactions with clients, customers and co-workers was a dominant feature of the embodied experiences of their work.
By combining our own incremental research processes with a more collective retrospective analysis, we found that each of our three cases highlighted different aspects of how men experience and manage intersections of masculinity, embodiment and intimacy in these relatively neglected occupations, while indicating some important similarities.
Intimacy at Work: Massage Therapists, Sex Shop Workers and Santa Claus Performers
Massage therapists
The male massage therapists we studied were required to negotiate professionalization techniques that, on the one hand, are underpinned by a desexualization imperative while, on the other, involve client exchanges that require a high level of physical and emotional intimacy. In practice, this means that male massage therapists are associated with a feminine, sexually encoded occupation, an association that potentially destabilizes heternormative masculinities. Yet they are also subject to gendered norms that position them and their desire for intimacy as potentially predatory. Social perceptions of male massage therapists, and the gendered bodily schemas to which they are subject, therefore appear to situate them somewhat precariously, as simultaneously hypo-and hyper-masculine.
In order to negotiate this, the men we studied mobilized clinical bodily schemas that evoke distance. Many of them wore medical ‘scrubs’ as their work uniform, others decorated their offices with anatomical wall charts or life-size skeletons. They also crafted a professional connection through the evocation of medical discourse and anatomical terminology, borrowing from medicine’s authority and desexualized perceptions, seemingly deploying a range of tactics to deflect the scrutiny they perceived to be attached to themselves and their work. Yet, despite these efforts, several of the men interviewed continued to experience difficulty in gaining clients or in securing employment. In their view, this was because of perceived associations of men’s bodies with predatory sexuality and impropriety. This was a problem that appeared to be intensified in an environment where client choice is paramount, and such clients have autonomy to select their therapist, with gender being a criterion underpinning such choice. One of the therapists explained this by indicating that when the worker’s body is male, proximity is framed in terms of sexuality rather than intimacy, with heterosexual male clients appearing to harbour fears of homosexuality and female clients fearing attack:
I have people who will call and want a massage: ‘I have Jess available.’ ‘Is that a male?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘I don’t want to see a male.’ And that will be both men and women, and so there’s this thought process out there that ‘I don’t want to go see this gender person for this role.’ … And so it’s not simply about ‘I don’t want this male therapist to touch me.’ It’s a sexual statement. So the gender and the sexual become, ‘If a woman is working on me and I get an erection, then that’s what happens. But what if I relax on this table and I get an erection with this male therapist, what does this say about me?’ I just think you get to tie those in very closely and that’s not about the organization, that’s not about massage. It’s about people and their perception.
This extract illustrates how men performing intimate labour conjure associations with predatory sexuality, with the male body being viewed with suspicion rather than legitimacy. The specific evocation of perception emphasizes that therapeutic massage shares with the medical profession a need to nurture both close physical proximity and, as noted above, with reference to Meerabeau’s (1999) earlier study, careful maintenance of the client or patient’s dignity. Yet in massage work the risks attached to sexualization are more difficult to negotiate, particularly when the massage therapist is male. His motives are subject to constant scrutiny as social perceptions of these motives are deeply embedded within gendered bodily schemas. Arguably, this is because a distrust of male therapists persists in part because the male therapist’s body does not correspond closely enough to socio-cultural perceptions of a safe or proficient caregiver. In addition, because the work of massage is often sexually coded by clients and members of the public, one can read client and employer resistance to hire a male therapist as embodying both homophobic fears and heteronormative anxieties. Another therapist furthers this claim when she said, ‘My friend had to go the medical route in massage because he’s a male. He does, unless he was gay. No man wants a relaxation massage from another man, unless they were both gay.’
Interestingly, the twin dilemmas of a lack of credibility and perceptions that male therapists are either homosexual or predatory or both seemed to require them to negotiate a delicate balance between seeking legitimacy, commonly by invoking a clinical disposition (Oerton, 2004; Sullivan, 2012), while securing their heterosexuality, often by objectifying the female body. What was absent in the ways in which the men in our study articulated and reflected on this balance, however, is how male bodies can be legitimate intimate labourers and how they can assist their clients to be open to men’s therapeutic touch. Instead, most of them framed clients as vulnerable, as indicated in the following extract from one of our interviews with a massage therapist who evokes his own power relative to the client’s vulnerability, the latter framed here through references to the client’s nakedness, objectification and lack of specialist, sensory knowledge:
There is a power differential. I mean you have someone lying naked on your table. They are more vulnerable, and they would be more vulnerable even if they were fully clothed because you are working on their body and you know more about how their body works than they do. (emphasis added)
In contrast to much of the literature discussed above, particularly Meerabeau (1999), Emerson (1970a, 1970b) and Giuffre and Williams’ (2000) earlier accounts of men’s negotiation of intimate encounters in medicine, the male therapists in our study also emphasized their readiness to defend themselves against what they perceived to be the potentially predatory nature of male clients’ sexuality. In one example, a male therapist recalled an incident regarding a phone call he received from a female colleague who worked in his office. She wanted him to know about a man who had come to her office to ask for sexual services. The male therapist said that he wanted to be ready should this man make an appointment with him, further explaining that he ‘wouldn’t be into that at all!’ In preparation, the next day he brought a steel bat to work and propped it in the corner of his treatment room. He explained that he kept the bat there for months to send the message to clients that ‘they better not try anything here’. He laughed and said that when clients asked about it, he’d say, ‘That’s here in case you get any ideas’. In this particular account, the bat constitutes an important signifier of his own ‘readiness to defend’, acting as a modifier of proximity that suggests distance and violence as opposed to intimacy and inter-corporeality.
To make sense of this, we can locate male massage therapists as responding to two socially constructed and interrelated assumptions about their work, and their status as workers: the male body is not fit for performing intimate labour, nor is it fit for consuming it, because of what is perceived, within heteronormative gendered bodily schemas, as the essentially predatory nature of male sexuality. Male therapists’ own negotiations of these assumptions reveal that their self-management tactics lean towards upholding hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity, particularly during embodied interactions such as the one described above, a theme that also recurred in our interviews with the men working in the sex shops we studied.
Men working in sex shops
Setting the men who worked in sex shops apart from the massage therapists discussed above were two important factors: (i) the sex shops in which the men were employed were all located in Soho, London, and formed part of a strong occupational community within which the place of work was particularly significant – this provided the basis for a relatively strong sense of identification that the massage therapists, who were more geographically dispersed, lacked (see Tyler, 2011, 2012); (ii) also in contrast to the massage therapists, the sector and setting appealed particularly to openly gay or bisexual men. Yet, at the same time, the sex industry has a long history of being associated with a particularly hegemonic hyper-masculinity – as one of the men who took part in our study framed it, ‘The sex industry always has been, and always will be, dominated by men. It’s an industry run by men, for men.’
All of the men interviewed referred to how being able to ‘handle’ the hyper-masculine, highly sexualized nature of the sector and the setting was an important part of the job, one that they often described in highly embodied ways that involved (similar to the massage therapists) objectifying women’s bodies, or affirming their own masculine sexual subjectivity. One of the store managers we spoke to, for instance, described how he would ask potential employees to handle some of the products sold in the store during recruitment interviews, explaining how men who were ‘timid and gentle, or not wanting to touch’ the sex toys were ‘wasting his time’. Similarly, another man described how learning to expect bodily exposure was an important rite of passage for him when he began working in the shop: ‘A man walked over with his penis out in the shop. You do get that … that was one of my first breaking moments in the first two months of the job’. Another (younger) man described his own embodied sense of violation as a result of a customer’s presumed intimacy that, for him, also constituted something of a rite of passage:
I’ve been smelt … That made me feel sick. I had a good two-hour shower after that. It just made me feel so dirty. Just like the idea of someone smelling you … Fair enough if you put your hand on my shoulder and I can push your hand off, but the idea of someone … That’s really intimate.
In addition to asserting their ability to navigate these embodied aspects of working in a sex shop, the men also emphasized their specialist knowledge of products and their potential uses, as well as their tacit ability to sense and deal with perceived risks from potentially dangerous customers, often responding (as did the massage therapist discussed above) with a violent defensiveness. As one of them put it,
The more you learn about how to deal with people, the more you can handle it … you can tell when they walk into the shops after about ten seconds, are they a thief, crackhead, and you can always tell the ones who are going to start coming onto you.
Similar to the description of recourse to the use of a baseball bat described above, one of our participants told us how he dealt with potentially violent or abusive customers, brandishing another (in this case, rather more literal) phallic object:
One of the weapons we’ve got is a double-ended dildo. You know, it’s a solid sort of penis and double-ended and if they come back in, I’d [raises the object above his head, as if ready to strike down] it almost diffuses the situation instantaneously.
As well as dealing with difficult customers, this self-assurance is also channelled into the provision of ‘quality’ customer service focusing particularly on the needs of customers who were perceived to lack confidence. In these forms of interaction, the men working in sex shops affirmed their masculinity in a slightly different way, namely through their ability to provide intimate service and get ‘close to the customer’, in this case both physically and often also sexually and emotionally. As one of the store managers described it:
I always say to the lads ‘Be polite and offer people your services’ because a lot of people come in and they are nervous. They might look down, and talk quietly, avoid eye contact, that sort of thing … You’ve got to move close to them and listen, really listen because they are investing a lot in this and you’ve got to help them to work out what they want.
Participants also explained how other customers, rather than being nervous and avoiding eye contact, appear to share the staff’s confidence. These customers were also understood to need and expect a high level of intimacy with sales staff but of a rather different kind. As one of the men we interviewed explained: ‘Some people do ask you some of the strangest things like you’re a sex therapist or their doctor even. They come out with such personal stuff.’ The men we interviewed had to negotiate their interactions with both types of customers –nervous customers seeking reassurance, who were perceived as needing intimacy, and those who demanded it because of their perceived over-confidence; the men working in the shops sought to navigate these encounters in a way that reinforced their own position as knowing, masculine subjects.
The men who worked in the shops performed their masculinities in a variety of ways, therefore. They did so by proving to themselves and others that they could ‘handle’ it, in some cases in highly ritualistic ways; by assuming a defensive violence against potentially threatening or abusive customers, and by asserting themselves as knowing subjects whose embodied, tacit knowledge enabled them to negotiate the boundary between the need for simultaneous distance and closeness. In negotiating all of these different aspects of their work, the men in our study were acutely aware of the need to maintain the boundary between proximity and propriety, or in their terms, to avoid ‘overstepping the mark’:
All the time, we are talking to people about things they are going to put inside of themselves. Sometimes I worry about touching them, the toys I mean, because I don’t want to get them dirty. We have wipes, of course, but I don’t just mean that. I don’t know … There’s a lot of trust, I suppose is what I’m trying to say … you have to be careful not to overstep the mark. (emphasis added)
What this particular participant evokes, and what the massage therapists and sex shop workers also share in common, is an experience of the challenges associated with negotiating intimate labour, and an awareness of the ways in which these challenges are shaped, at least in part, by gender. What also differentiates them, however, is not so much the occupational character of their roles, but rather an emphasis in the case of the massage workers on the primacy of intimate physical contact while, in the case of the sex shop workers, their experiences are shaped by a greater sense of the need to be able to engender a closer emotional and, in some respects, sexual relationship. The latter is based on the mobilization of their sensory, tacit knowledge grounded in their own embodied experiences and dispositions, rather than the nurturance of a sexually intimate relationship with customers. They were also aware of the risks attached to this presumed intimacy, referring in several instances to the ‘fine line’ they have to negotiate in this aspect of their interactions with customers. In our final case, this latter theme is particularly problematic, and forms the basis of highly self-conscious performances among the workers involved, as the main recipients of intimate labour in the third of our three cases are children.
Santa Claus performers
In contrast to the work of massage therapists (which straddles interactive service work and the medical profession), and sex shop workers (which arguably blurs boundaries between retail work and those employed in the margins of the sex industry), the work of the Santa Claus performer occupies a somewhat liminal space between service worker and theatrical performer. Although many of the interviewees experienced the worst excesses of what Korczynski, Shire, Frenkel and Tam (2000) describe as the ‘customer orientated bureaucracy’, mediating the competing demands for efficiency (in terms of customer throughput) with effectiveness (in the provision of a ‘quality’ customer service), for most performers this was not the most difficult aspect of the job. Rather, it was the expectation that they should be able to fully identify with the mythological – and entirely virtuous – characteristics of Santa Claus. For in addition to being a commercially significant dimension of the Christmas industry, Santa Claus (or as he is commonly known in the UK, Father Christmas) is also a figure 6 of transcendent goodness, patience and generosity (Hancock, 2013). Because of the cultural ubiquity of Santa, those who perform the role in a professional capacity indicated that they could not simply ‘act the part’; rather they sought to inhabit the identity in its entirety – physically, emotionally, intellectually and ethically: ‘To achieve recognition as the authentic embodiment of the Santa Claus mythology, one must “be Santa”’ (Hancock, 2013, p. 4).
This desire to fully embody Santa shaped the emphasis the performers placed on the importance of nurturing a close emotional and aesthetic bond with customers, signified by an embodied, but entirely ‘proper’ connection:
If you do it well enough and you really get into the act and you really do it well, they forget and you can see the belief. These kiddies sit there with open mouths and they’re looking up at you, trusting little things like little chicks and you think, ‘This is just wonderful!’ (emphasis added)
Here, the direct eye contact as a sign of intimacy, with children ‘looking up at you’, indicates both the ethical authority and hence responsibility attached to the role, as well as marking a direct contrast with the men working in sex shops who are advised to ‘avoid eye contact’ with shy or nervous customers, so as not to appear intimidating. As this interviewee emphasizes, the level of authenticity and recognition he describes is not simply given, but rather requires a level of intimacy that must be continually worked at and which is highly inter-corporeal. The intimate labour involved requires considerable personal investment, including the purchasing of a custom-made costume and accessories such as gloves and make-up. It also demands attention to personal hygiene, with the odour of alcohol or tobacco being particularly taboo. This investment is not simply stylized, however. It is also profoundly affective, particularly during instances when a performer is required to navigate difficult family circumstances such as separations or bereavements, while maintaining the integrity of the character. The following interviewee describes this with reference to his own embodied experience of such encounters: ‘It hits you in the heart [but] no, I’ve never lost it. You’ve got tears coming down your face, but you’re still being merry, do you know what I mean?’ (emphasis added).
This level of investment also resulted in an ever-present need to be constantly alert to potential threats to the moral integrity of the character, for two reasons. First, the primary client group is children and, as Cook (2004) has noted, referring to the latter as a ‘protected species’, little in contemporary society commands the kind of guarded, hyper-moral intensity as children and childhood. Second, as alluded to above, those who take on the role are perceived within the industry to be custodians of the personification of a belief system, rather than merely performers in a theatrical sense. Perhaps more so than for workers in the two other sectors considered above, this means that these men have to maintain constant vigilance, and negotiate an especially delicate balance between proximity and propriety. In particular, and in direct contrast to the sex shop workers considered above, this means explicitly disassociating themselves and their workplace performances from any sexual connotations.
This need to maintain a desexualized identity in order to preserve the moral integrity of the character influenced the ways in which some of the performers interacted with co-workers as well as clients, as the following extract, referring to the propriety expected from interactions between Santa Claus performers and their co-workers in a store grotto (in this case, those playing the role of elves), indicates:
Well, if you have an elf you can talk to the elf, but you have to make sure that you keep it in character just in case, you know, because sometimes kids will come and, you know, peek from behind clothes racks and this and that and listen. So you can’t be, you know, flirting with your elf or anything like that. (emphasis added)
For most, however, this constant vigilance related primarily to their direct contact with children, particularly in terms of negotiating the boundaries between nurturing a strong emotional connection, at the same time as maintaining professional distance, as the following interview extracts indicate:
Nowadays, in the current climate, they don’t want kids to sit on Santa’s lap because Santa Claus could be some kind of weirdo or something, which is a shame. I mean, you know, when you’re a kid part of the joy was going up and sitting on Santa Claus’ lap. One little … boy ran in at Christmas. I’m sitting on the sleigh and he ran in and he just threw his arms around me and went like that and just hugged me and you just think ‘Oh, this is lovely!’ and then you go ‘Oh god, hang on. Whoa!’ and you’ve just got to back off. It’s such a shame … (emphasis added)
Furthermore, as the following extract suggests, the delicacy of this boundary was understood by the performers themselves to be shaped by intersections of gender, sexuality and also age, and by the heightened scrutiny attached to a man performing intimate labour:
You know, this is not an area we talk about an awful lot because too much is made of it, but there is a slight, I think, nervousness because everyone has this fear in their mind that everyone who’s an old bloke is a pervert.
Despite their awareness of such risks, and the need to maintain constant vigilance, the interviewees reported a strong emotional attachment to the role. As one of them explained it: ‘I started because … I needed to earn some money, you know. I’ve got bills to pay the same as anybody else and once I started I just absolutely fell in love with it.’ Nurturing a close bond with children was especially important to the men in our study, and as the following extract suggests, this closeness was understood to be highly embodied, requiring a tactility that in this instance the increasingly ubiquitous wearing of gloves blocked, but which were deemed necessary by many in order to maintain propriety and avoid the corporeal immediacy of flesh to flesh contact:
The Santas are great guys. They all wear their white gloves and things. Now children hate white gloves. Well, they hate gloves. They don’t like it. If you hold a hand you want to, you know, hold a hand, you don’t want to hold a glove.
Here, the interviewee evokes the importance of touch in intimate labour, discussing it literally (‘if you hold a hand, you want to … hold a hand’) but also by implication, suggesting a more metaphorical connection, an inter-corporeal ethos that he feels the normative associations governing this particular interaction preclude, a constraint he regrets (‘you don’t want to hold a glove’).
In summary, it can be said that each of these three occupational groups experienced, by virtue of their embodied masculinity, a need to maintain a heightened vigilance, negotiating perceptual boundaries between proximity and propriety. This not only illustrates some of the ways in which, within these particular organizational settings, workplace identities are complex performative accomplishments; it also emphasizes how normative, gendered perceptions of intimate forms of labour shape organizational interactions. Further, the men in our studies were conscious of the extent to which, as workers, we have relatively limited control over how our work is encoded and understood within broader cultural imaginaries and social perceptions. In their references to the need to ‘be careful’, the men who took part in our studies evoke a similar perception of their work and themselves as workers, finding the need to maintain constant vigilance one of the more demanding, if not demoralizing, aspects of their respective roles. In short, it is the way in which their work as men performing intimate labour is organized according to the terms of heteronormative bodily schemas and hegemonic social perceptions of masculinity that make them ‘nervous’, as the Santa Claus performer cited above puts it, or ‘careful not to overstep the mark’, as the sex shop worker referred to earlier describes it. It is this self-consciousness that results in a demanding vigilance, a perpetual ‘nervousness’ as one of our interviewees put it, that is a central feature of the exchange relations involved in all three areas of work.
Perception, Proximity and Propriety in Intimate Labour
The men in our studies were conscious of the need to maintain vigilance within their respective organizational settings, largely because of their awareness of social perceptions of male bodies as lacking proficiency and propriety in interactive service environments that depend upon intimate labour. Their understanding of this was highly embodied and they each had to develop sensory skills in discerning when a touch became ‘too much’. This is because the men in our studies had to cultivate intimacy, through various forms of proximity, often working with customers’ or clients’ bodies that are coded as vulnerable. In massage therapy, clients are often naked or semi-clothed and lying down; they are often stressed, injured or perhaps simply uncertain of the treatment that will form the basis of the encounter. In sex shops, customers are often embarrassed or vulnerable, feeling aware of the taints associated with frequenting the sector or settings they are in. In the case of Santa Claus performers, perhaps the most hyper-guarded of all the men we studied, clients are primarily children and hence are perceived as particularly vulnerable. In practice, this means that all of the men are under constant scrutiny, both for their performative credibility as well as their moral integrity, so that men’s negotiation of proximity and propriety in all three roles is especially precarious as a result.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) observation that, as embodied beings, we are always ‘with’ others by virtue of our shared corporeality, we can grasp how the men we studied are organized through gendered bodily schemas by virtue of both their embodied materiality as well as the gender conditioning that emerges from their social situation. Hence, men have to continually negotiate a range of gendered assumptions shaping social perceptions that are reproduced through mass media and popular cultural portrayals that encode hegemonic masculinities in particular ways. 7 What this cultural situating or encoding implies is the perpetuation of bodily schemas that position men’s bodies as sites of intimate danger rather than care (Sargent, 2004), serving to limit men’s organizational ability to nurture a close bond with others. At the same time, the men work within a customer service ethos that frames intimate labour according to a proximal sociality. Hence, the men in our study are caught between the expectation that within their respective organizational roles they will provide an intimate experience for others, while they also have to maintain a professional, proper distance that undermines their capacity to do so.
In order to make sense of this, we would argue that a common feature across each of the three groups we studied is an organizational manifestation of what Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 169) describes as ‘dispositional tendencies’ through which men learn to negotiate complex intersections of bodily proximity, masculinity and social perceptions of propriety. Rather than engendering intimacy, these dispositional tendencies, and the gendered bodily schemes underpinning them, necessitate men reasserting bodily discretion through the deployment of tactics designed to maintain distance and to deflect the potential risks associated with intimate encounters. In practice, this requires them to be highly guarded, and to organize their bodies through an ongoing negotiation of the tensions between masculinity, propriety and proximity. For the male massage therapists we studied, their sexualization as potentially predatory undermined their legitimacy, and hence their capacity and willingness to be open to others and to perform intimate labour effectively. Their self-management tactics referenced hegemonic, heteronormative assumptions about themselves and their work, as did those of the men working in sex shops that we interviewed. The latter mobilized various forms of defensive violence, epistemic privilege and hierarchies of masculinity, positioning themselves as different from the ‘failed’ masculinities they associated with predatory or anxious customers, emphasizing their capacity to ‘handle’ the sector and setting in which they worked. These tactics, rather than engendering an ethic of openness to the needs of the other, and to a mutual recognition of shared, embodied vulnerabilities, often resulted in a heightened vigilance and a reassertion of embodied boundaries; in being constantly aware of the risks attached to ‘overstepping the mark’ as one of them put it. The Santa Claus performers provided perhaps the most poignant accounts of the ways in which our participants’ willingness to be open to others was constrained, recounting their efforts to remain guarded at all times, a situation they particularly regretted due the impact they felt it had on their ability to perform their roles. The constraints imposed on their ability to nurture intimacy for all of the three groups of men in our study were signified in a very material sense in their references to the baseball bat, the double-ended sex toy and the importance of wearing gloves, respectively. Each of the latter represented not just physical but important symbolic mechanisms through which bodily boundaries could be maintained, and the fine line between proximity and propriety negotiated.
In understanding lived experiences of these negotiations, our analysis has sought to highlight the guarded modes of embodied interaction that shape the organizational experiences of men performing intimate labour. We have done so by mobilizing Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) ontology of embodied subjectivity, emphasizing how, for the men in our study, their subjectivity is shaped by gendered bodily schemas rendered pre-social (and hence pre-organizational) in the dominant cultural imaginary. Their gender roles and identities within their respective organizational settings were far from given, and their subject positions required continual negotiation involving the mobilization of certain subjectivities and the disavowal of others. The proximity that would normally be associated with the provision of good-quality customer service demanded an openness to the other, yet their gender identities and the bodily schemas by which they were governed precluded them from opening themselves up to too much intimacy, for to do so endangered their credibility and security. As such, rather than opening themselves and their work up to the possibilities of inter-corporeal intimacy and the ethical potential associated with it (Merleau-Ponty, 2002), the precarious positions in which the men found themselves precluded them from being sufficiently open to the other.
Conclusions
This paper has sought to further the inroads that phenomenological thinking, and particularly Merleau-Ponty’s writing on perception, have made into organization studies in recent years. In doing so, it has sought to draw on and develop perception as an empirical, methodological and epistemological concept. First, our empirical focus has been on the ways in which men’s experiences of intimate labour are shaped by their sense of how they are perceived by their co-workers, clients and colleagues, and of how social perceptions of gender and sexuality impact upon their organizational roles and experiences. Second, in our commitment to understanding the relationship between meaning and materiality, we have drawn on perception as a methodological concept focusing on lived experiences and embodied perceptions of organizational processes and settings. Finally, we have deployed perception epistemologically, through our concern to understand how the men in our study make sense of their social world and their relationship to others through their embodied expertise and ways of knowing. The latter has led us to emphasize the significance of the body as a ‘medium of learning and knowing’ (Yakhlef, 2010, p. 409) in the performance and negotiation of intimate labour in which ‘getting close to the customer’ has to be pursued at the same time as maintaining bodily propriety. In this sense our findings have emphasized how learning to recognize and negotiate potential instances of when a touch becomes ‘too much’, to recognize and cope with what Meerabeau (1999) calls ‘boundary breaches’, is vital to men’s capacity to negotiate legitimacy as intimate labourers. In this sense, gendered, heteronormative bodily schemas undermine men’s capacity to foster intimacy, resulting in a struggle for recognition of their legitimacy within their respective organizational roles and settings.
The men in our study dealt with this struggle through the deployment of a series of coping techniques through which all three groups were driven by a desire to have their performance acknowledged as both socially appropriate and sufficiently engaged according to the terms of their employment and the broader service culture within which they worked. As such, how they judged and performed the lines of propriety were ascertained and articulated in highly embodied ways (Yakhlef, 2010; Yakhlef & Essen, 2013), thrown into relief during instances when the boundary between proximity and propriety had to be re-negotiated.
The complex combination of the physically, sexually and/or emotionally intimate nature of their work, social perceptions of their work and themselves as workers, combined with a vigilant performance of masculinity meant that, for the men in our study, negotiating propriety and proximity was a constant process. The need to maintain bodily boundaries meant that their scope for fostering intimacy with their customers, clients or co-workers was constrained. Rather than interacting with others through an ethic of openness, ‘being with them instead of being simply beside other people’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 111), dominant social perceptions of themselves and their work mean that the men in our study have to do precisely the opposite. As Merleau-Ponty reminds us, what he calls ‘the cohesion of an inter-subjective life’ (p. 525) requires that ‘the experience of each one of us links with that of others’; yet if it is also the case that structures of social perception ‘always depend on the organization of the field’ (p. 359) then the organization of gendered bodily schemes, and of the system of ‘self-others-things’ through which they are materialized, continually undermines men’s capacity to perform intimate forms of labour ethically, if the latter requires an openness to oneself and others.
In conclusion, in developing these themes, we have drawn on insights from Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) phenomenological account of perception. First, we emphasized how it offers a post-dualistic ontology of the embodied subject at work and, in doing so, challenges both theoretical analyses of organizational subjectivity that privilege cognition as the locus of sense making. Second, we have also drawn on this account to emphasize how our ethical openness to the world cannot be reduced simply to a commercial imperative or moral obligation, but is a basic ontological necessity, one that organizations as settings of human interaction and exchange undermine. For the men in our study, this was particularly the case due to the bodily schemas governing their work. Our emphasis in this respect has been on the potential such an analysis has for developing a critical, reflexive understanding of the ways in which we experience and mobilize embodied practices to negotiate intimacy within organizations. Of course, in this respect we have considered only three examples of men working in distinct (albeit related) settings. More consideration needs to be given to the negotiation of intersections of masculinity, proximity and propriety in other sectors to develop a greater understanding of the contexts and consequences for those working in intimate forms of interactive labour of when a touch becomes ‘too much’.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are very grateful for the editorial support received, and for the insights provided by the three anonymous reviewers. The contribution of the men who took part in the research, and who shared their time, work spaces and experiences with us, is also gratefully acknowledged.
Funding
This research was partially funded by the British Academy (award number: SG-54347).