To Touch Is to Tremble
Unanticipated intimacies of care in Taiwanese gay erotic massage
“Does my hand tremble when I touch him?”
We must imagine John asks this when he attends to his client during a massage session. John is a masseur, one of several whose experiences of working in Taiwanese gay erotic massage are presented in Chen’s (2018) ethnography.
Chen makes several key points about bodywork and intimacy in his fieldwork. Firstly, Chen argues that intimacy and bodywork incorporate affective and corporeal relations in gay erotic massage. Affective embodiment leads to the ‘empathetic and transformative capacity of touching’. Chen connects gay erotic massage to Taiwanese cultural contexts where masseurs perceive their work as moral and aligned with the caring ethic of ‘Buddhist merit accumulation’.
One of John’s clients has a disabled arm and a scar on his thigh after a traffic accident. This evokes John’s compassion, and he describes how he felt when he saw the scar:
‘While touching the scar, I was wondering why such a terrible thing could happen to someone that marked his life forever. I felt I could understand the hard time he had been through. I was trying my best to massage his thigh, to relieve his suffering. I wished his miseries could just end here.’ (Chen 2018: 645)
In response to Chen’s perspectives on intimacy and affective embodiment, this essay argues that John experiences ‘trembling’ when he touches his client. This term is used to describe the ambivalence John feels, between disgust towards a body type figured as imperfect and undesirable, and sympathy for the suffering of the client. The experience is ‘intermediate’ (Throop, 2009), holds contradictory emotions simultaneously and prompts John to respond ethically to the particularity of the client’s pain and emotional needs.
Trembling, then, is the experience of ‘variations’, which describes the multiple potentialities of becoming that John may enact into the possible, but before remained virtual and unactualised (see Biehl 2010 on Deleuze). But as ‘trembling’ suggests, it is up for discussion whether John successfully contains and chooses between these multiple possibilities of action or rather ends up reproducing new conditions of uncertainty about how to appropriately demonstrate care.
Merleau-Ponty on the body, and the ‘affective turn’
For Merleau-Ponty, ask not what the body is, but what it does. The French phenomenologist was interested in embodiment as the merger between the subject and the world as object, where the act of perceiving and interacting constitutes our sense of self, whilst at the same time being constantly in flux and negotiating change.
Merleau-Ponty’s embodied self has radical implications for describing an intersubjective and intercorporeal self which acquires a sense of selfhood from touch. We are almost always touching something - the clothes on our back or the ground beneath our feet - where we are consistently shaped by this touch before we even begin to touch others. In Maclaren’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, she describes the ‘strange ambiguity’ of the body as both sentient and sensible, representing ‘active’ and ‘passive’ senses - but the very meaning of these terms are blurred when we are transformed by touch or invite touch ourselves (2013: 97). Merleau-Ponty describes this as ‘perceptible-percipience’ (1964: 167), which means the easy reversibility of touch where the one touching is transformed by the one being touched and vice versa.
Affect theory supplements Merleau-Ponty’s perspective by explaining how emotion may not arise as an innate drive from the interiorised self, but from the exchange of affect in the relationalities of a situation (Paterson, 2007; Blackman and Venn, 2010).
Applying this concept to John and his client, we observe how touching becomes an intercorporeal, bi-directional exchange of affective energy where both enter an embodied process of self-transformation. The client does not just passively receive care, but invites it, relates his life story with John and comes out healed and accepted by John as a valued bodily-person. Meanwhile, John does the massage, but must listen and respond appropriately to his client’s needs. The reversibility of roles and indeterminate nature of the massage creates the ‘unanticipated intimacy’ which arises from unscripted care and the excitement of uncertainty (Walby, 2012)
Implications for the queer body and the caring ethic
More broadly, Chen’s research challenges the ‘happy queer’ which excludes the presence and portrayal of disabled or aged bodies in queer communities (Ahmed, 2010; Kulick and Rydström, 2015). The massage is the site of potential relationalities and intimacies which accept the ‘rejected body’ and create a limited form of inclusivity (Chen, 2018: 646).
Moreover, Chen argues that in Taiwanese cultural context, masseurs defend their practice by referring to the Buddhist concept of merit accumulation and argue that their practice becomes a caring ethic for the sexually marginalized.
This links to other phenomenological discussions of ethics in anthropology. Throop (2009) discusses attunement as a mode of ethical belonging and living morally with others, while Zigon (2014) discusses attunement and fidelity as paired modes of ethical being with others; where fidelity requires reflection to repair relations after moments of moral breakdown. Particular acts of embodied care have the potential then to form enduring relations of authentic and ethical being with others.
Trembling reconciles Merleau-Ponty’s perspective on the singular and unitary individual constituted by the act of perceiving through affect theory’s radical turn into affective intensities that assemble the ‘individual’. It does this by leaning towards Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the individual body as the site for potential action, but anticipates the affective critique by arguing that the body exists within multiplicities of affective, or effective, action - which this essay describes as variations.
This has wider implication on the study of affective embodiment in fields like male sex work which has previously been left under-explored, as well as pointing to future research into the moral dimension and dynamics of intimacy unique to sex work.
Words by Sean Chou
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