Reciprocating Desire in China: A Comparative Approach between High-end and Low-end Sex Workers and Their Clients

This article examines how socioeconomic conditions impact heteronormative sexual desires between high-end sex workers and low-end sex workers and their clients in urban South China. Drawing both the concepts of dealing in desires and desiring China, the article compares the role of desire between workers and clients in two distinctly different contexts. This study reveals how socioeconomic contexts impact our understanding of what qualifies as reciprocating desires. In particular, the conditions and realities that sex workers and clients in urban China negotiate are recognized and discussed. Ethnographic research with a range of sex workers was conducted in South China from the summer of 2013 to the summer of 2017. In total, 100 sex workers and 150 clients were interviewed in these two niche markets were interviewed. In both high- and low-end sex workers see sex work as a path to individualization which reflects the nation’s accelerated transition to a country of individualized desires.