Positional embodiment: How networks shape the lived experiences of the bodies of female sex workers in post‐socialist China

This paper accounts for the influence of social networks on female sex workers (FSWs) (xiaojie) in post‐socialist China, as they interpret cultural values and meaning, create and revise strategies for survival and success, and embody their lived experiences. Drawing upon recent feminist ethnography on sex work and embodiment, I describe the network processes that draw these women into sex work and contribute to both their achievements and challenges as a form of “positional embodiment.” The concept of “positional embodiment” highlights the role of social networks in creating and maintaining a particular inscribed and agentic sex worker body. In identifying this meso‐level process, I delineate the culturally specific and structurally framed ways in which social networks position the women to make daily choices within structural constraints, choices that ultimately lead to the patterned embodiment of their daily experiences. Even as these savvy entrepreneurs tend to exceed gendered moral obligations to family and actively immerse themselves as trendy modern women in contemporary urban lifestyles, they also struggle with the emotional and physical suffering of working within the sex industry. In this sense, their bodies become fields where various challenges and achievements are negotiated, contested, and embodied. This paper intends to contribute to our understanding of intimate labor by developing the concept of “positional embodiment” from the lens of social networks of FSWs.