Desire and confusion: A sociolinguistic ethnography on affect in the ethnic economy of Thai massage

2.1 Ethnic economies as an analytical lens

When groups of immigrants from the same country or region develop entrepreneurial profiles in specific industries or niches and draw on internal networks for economic solidarity, they are considered “ethnic economies” (Light and Gold 2007). While many of these niches make use of a specific ethnic cuisine or cultural product, they often have formed somewhat serendipitously. Local institutional, political and economic conditions offer opportunities to newcomers hailing from the same “ethnic”, “national” or linguistic background, while the economic activity can be unrelated to the “culture” of the group in question (for example Vietnamese nail shops that originated in the United States, cf. Eckstein and Nguyen 2011). Research has pointed out that specific ethnic economies are informed by group-internal features (e.g. socio-economic background) as well as by the “opportunity structure” of the host country (Waldinger et al. 1990), i.e. migration policies, societal “openness” (which includes access to the labour market or to economic resources) and the availability of intra-ethnic social networks for group-internal recruiting of labour force or for other economic activities. In a reciprocal manner, the opportunity structure heavily influences group-internal features. For example, the study on the emergence and spreading of the Vietnamese manicure industry in and beyond the US clearly emphasises the importance of local initiatives and professional training allowed in languages other than English. It was particularly this linguistic openness that made it possible for Vietnamese women to carve out a specific niche for themselves, i.e. the affordable walk-in version of the already existing manicure business (Eckstein and Nguyen 2011).

The figure of the ethnic entrepreneur has been a special focus point for research. They have been studied extensively in their efforts of looking for employment, and as potentially providing employment for other members of the same ethnic group. Their primary motivation has often been understood as an attempt to overcome “blocked mobility” (Raijman and Tienda 2000) in the new political economy, i.e. to productively apply themselves on their own when their original professional qualifications are not valorised. However, whether the founding of an ethnic business really is a “stepladder experience” (Raijman and Tienda 2000) leading to upward social mobility not only depends heavily on individual aspirations and/or the resources available (e.g. financial, material, personal) but also on the specific business sector. In any case, networks based on shared “ethnicity” (or nationality) seem to repeatedly emerge as a functional instrument to overcome difficulties encountered on the local labour market, and can be ideally drawn on for solidarity and reciprocity. Furthermore, such networks provide support for individual or collective experiences of discrimination and exclusion, and facilitate access to information, capital and institutions. While the ethnic economy thus offers advantages to entrepreneurs and their employees, there are also potential drawbacks; namely, loss in salary because of social obligations to remain in a specific business sector (Sanders and Nee 1987) or the danger of being employed under informal and illegal work conditions, due to the avoidance of complicated and costly legal employment (Portes 1995). Finally, remaining in intra-ethnic economies can run counter to the legally widely implemented pressure to learn and improve the locally dominant language.

Recent research has pointed out that it is problematic to use the term “ethnic economy” for several reasons (e.g. Pécoud 2010). First of all, “ethnicity” can be an imprecise description, a shifting index of belonging that only sometimes coincides with nation-state boundaries, while in fact at times nationality becomes the most important common denominator – or, under other circumstances, sub-ethnic categorisations emerge as prevalent. In this line, I am aware of the debate surrounding the term “ethnic” economies, further contested by the proposition of “migrant” economies instead (Glick Schiller et al. 2006), which intends to broaden the discussion and to refrain from culturalising tendencies in research. Yet in the case of Thai massage, the ethnicity of the women is a central element of their economic activity and its ascriptions, which is why I will keep with this term for the purpose of this paper. Finally, research on ethnic economies has mostly focused on male entrepreneurs and/or on family structures in support such endeavours (Dannecker and Çakır 2016; Erdem 2005). The Thai community in Vienna, however, is largely female. There are concrete reasons for the female composition of this community, contributing to its specific ethnic economy, i.e. Thai massage, which has specific gendered and affective challenges and issues. In view of the existing bias toward male entrepreneurs, my research can contribute to making this strand of research less gender-biased. In sum, I understand the “ethnic economy” as a conceptual lens in order to gain a sociolinguistic ethnographic understanding of its challenges and issues that are further exacerbated by societal pressure to learn the local language.

2.2 The affect of desire as patterned practice

Affect has increasingly become the focus in research across the social sciences as a critical component that relates to, impacts on and intersects gender (Butler 1997), race (Ahmed 2004), labour (Hochschild 2012 [1983]), and language (Besnier 1990), resulting in its own bona fide “turn” at the beginning of the millennium (cf. Clough and Halley 2007). Affect can be described as “every aspect of emotion and sometimes it refers to just physical disturbance and bodily activity” (Wetherell 2012: 2), but its conceptual understanding actually implies a complex variety of theoretical approaches, according to the ontological and epistemological stances of the research(ers) in question (cf. Wetherell (2012) for a general overview). In the critical study of language, affect becomes relevant in that it emerges in relation to language practices and language ideologies, as described by McElhinny (2010) in her review article on the interplay of gender, race and affect. Sociolinguists have pointed to the relevance of researching the role of affect for language learning (Busch 2017), the ramifications of societal concepts of the legitimate speaker (Boudreau 2016) or, in relation to this, the linguistic insecurity of speakers (Park 2017).

Echoing the main tenet of critical sociolinguistic scholarship, i.e. to address the social dimension of language use (Del Percio et al. 2017; Kraft 2016), I will draw on Wetherell’s (2012) proposal to understand affect not as a singular, isolated and individual “emotion”, but as socially patterned and distributed. This implies that the patterns of affect are intrinsically linked with and embedded in political economic relations. Secondly, affect should be understood as practice – similar to how critical sociolinguists address language as practice rather than abstract system. Affect should thus be approached as emerging in interaction and as enacted, situated and negotiated. Finally, affective practice is “bodily activity” (Wetherell 2012: 2), most clearly visible in affects displayed and enacted bodily, such as joy, fear, panic or desire. In short, affect becomes what Wetherell (2012: 4) calls “embodied meaning-making”, i.e. “[a]n affective practice is a figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning-making and with other social and material figurations” (Wetherell 2012: 19), which, again, are framed by the political economy.

There is one particular form of affect that emerges in the context of the ethnic economy of Thai massage: the affect of desire. Subjected to critical investigation in sociolinguistics, desire has been understood as residing closely to a complex of politics and power, in that it is connected to subordination (cf. Cameron and Kulick 2003; Foucault 1978). The sheer drive to desire anything is thus determined by power structures and by one’s position in the social structure: not everyone is deemed legitimate to desire something, someone, a certain action or product – or to actually express this desire. In this sense, studying desire becomes highly informative of power structures, privilege and entitlement, and mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion that are informed by hierarchised ideologies of gender and race. Invoking post-colonial concerns raised by Fanon (2008), Milani (2016: 412) reminds us “that the power imbalances produced and justified on racial grounds cannot be fully understood unless one also teases out the sexual desires and fears generated by race”. In sum, as any other affect or affective practice, desire is not located in an individual but is embedded in larger societal patterns and practices, in language practice(s), discourse(s) and sign(s). It is infused with power and with a claim of legitimacy to be able to desire and to take what one desires.

Approaching the affect of desire as a socially patterned and distributed practice, we are confronted with several layers of questions – most importantly: Who is in charge of the meaning-making and the interpretation thereof? How is the meaning-making distributed across participants, and in which social and material figurations? And, finally, in what way and for which reason does this bear importance for the critical study of language? With these questions in mind, I argue that the analysis of affect as practice will shed light on the social practices, power constellations and political economic conditions that engender or frame this very affective practice. In my contribution I will focus on the affective practice of desire, which emerges at the intersection of ethnicity and gender, most notably in the work context of Thai massage, a particular case of the ethnic economy. First, however, I will briefly describe the research this contribution draws on, before discussing the positionality and required reflexivity in ethnographic research.

3.1 A critical sociolinguistic ethnography of Thai massage in Vienna

The research is conceptualised as an ethnography of long duration with a critical sociolinguistic perspective. In practical terms, this means that I have been hanging out at a particular Thai massage studio in one of the lesser affluent areas of Vienna for two years at the time of writing. The visits are of irregular manner and diverse with respect to interval, weekday, time of day, duration and interactants, but generally I spend 2 to 5 h there in the morning on a weekday every two to three weeks. Present are normally two Thai massage therapists, Naa and Dohng,^[1] who are working, cleaning up the studio, cooking lunch, doing laundry – or simply waiting for customers, napping, and watching Thai TV shows. The elderly boss joins later around noon when the clients tend to drop by, so she can be in charge, i.e. opening the door, picking up the phone, settling the bill, etc. Occasionally, I will help out with small tasks before the boss’ arrival, as well as with documents, instructions, and letters in German if they have issues understanding them.

My visits and interactions in this studio are documented in the form of field notes, complemented by a collection of documents, websites, online discussion forum on Thai massage, photographs, etc. The analysis of this data follows the ethnographic attempt of thick description (Geertz 1973) that ideally leads to a detailed, contextual, and situated understanding of meaning-making in situ. In-depth qualitative interviews serve as complementary windows into specific histories, narratives and positionings of interlocutors. For this purpose, I have talked to and interviewed a broad variety of informants (e.g. other TMT – also of Austrian origin –, clients, and Thai officials in Austria), resulting in about 20 audio-registered and transcribed interviews.^[2] Two interviews with male European customers are most interesting in terms of understanding the affective practice of massage. I will therefore draw on these interviews for exemplary reasons (Sections 4.1 and 4.2), as well as on field notes in order to reflect on the women’s ambiguous positioning (Section 4.3). The analysis will be guided by the interest to understand how the affect of desire is semiotically (Section 4.1), discursively (Section 4.2) and reflexively (Section 4.3) evoked and negotiated in the guise of “confused affect” – with different stakes, aims and consequences for the individuals involved.

In my ethnographic visits to the studio, my Asian appearance has led to a constant scrutinisation by customers and visiting acquaintances alike: am I a new colleague, a fellow Thai compatriot? While this negotiation of my person and positionality helps break the ice, more importantly, it is telling about the automatic positioning that is going on in everyday life on the basis of ethnicity and gender, which will manifest in language choice also (e.g. Kubota 2014). Arguably, this does not come as a surprise, but it still constitutes an important part of ethnographic research into these exact sociolinguistic components of ethnicity and gender, and forces us to reflect on our positionality as researchers. We might be first and foremost just another person in an interaction, but we always come with a specific, politically inscribed and marked body. Repeated ambiguous experiences in my personal life regarding the racialisation of my body have sensitised me to recognise and question sexist Orientalist stereotypes. Thus, I critically reflect on the potentially offensive undertone of my research, most importantly about running the risk of reinforcing such harmful stereotypes. My primary aim is to understand the intersectionality of language, work, ethnicity, and gender and how it is infused with particular ideologies and processes that might marginalise these women. Yet, I argue that employing a solely critical perspective that seeks to identify how this particular economic activity is pervaded by orientalising stereotypes, also runs the danger of diminishing the agency of these women and painting their lives in overly negative terms, victimizing them as a result. This is why an ethnography is the most suitable research stance, since it allows me to understand how these women make sense of their lives, how they attain agency, and what meaning they attribute to their everyday social practices without overly prioritizing preconceived notions (cf. Heller 2008).

3.2 The (female) Thai community in Vienna

In Austria, about 4000 Thai nationals were officially registered in 2013 (the latest numbers available), in addition to about 5500 Austrian nationals of Thai origin (Butratana and Trupp 2011: 183). The largest percentage of Thais (both groups included) live in Vienna, about 1200 and 1550 respectively; 85% of this population are women, with 1500 in Vienna alone (the gender distribution is similar in other European countries, e.g. in Germany, Denmark or the Netherlands, cf. Sunanta (2020); Trupp and Butratana (2016)).^[3] As with every other migrant group, the women in Vienna are of different socio-economic backgrounds and from different regions in Thailand. While there are highly educated urban women working for the United Nations in Vienna, there is also a large group from rural (often north-eastern) Thailand with lesser professional qualifications, mostly employed as TMT or cleaning staff. While these different groups do not necessarily interact on a daily basis, there are certain spaces that offer a sense of community irrespective of social standing, e.g. Buddhist temples or the local open-air picnic taking place everyday in summer, where Thai food and drinks are sold, games are played and massages are offered. In any case, according to my observations, Thai women in and around Vienna seem to form a close network, engaging in various forms of informal economy (e.g. selling food door-to-door), and recommend each other, e.g. when a replacement for a TMT is needed.

Of the Thai women living in Austria, 60% are married to an Austrian resident, with marriage one of the main possibilities to enter the country. This rate has actually gone down due to stricter financial (net-income) and linguistic requirements (cf. Butratana and Trupp 2011: 186), which is related to the migration policies of the European Union, making it increasingly difficult for “citizens” of so-called “third countries” to get a visa. The policies have resulted in only two possibilities for entry: (1) family reunification (with an officially certified A1-level in the local language, hence German in Austria) or (2) highly valued professional skills, in which case requirements are waived. As the majority of Thai women have no (officially recognised) qualifications, they arrive in the framework of family reunification. Yet, the most important factor for this female “surplus” is the global marriage pattern between Western men and Asian women, which is deeply entrenched in the (post-)colonial “logics of desire” still present today. While marriage patterns are highly complex and individual, researchers (e.g. Lapanun 2012) have discerned veritable entrepreneurial motivation on the side of many Thai women (e.g. to be able to send remittances to the family/community at home) as well as idealised views of Asian wives on the side of European men. Lapanun (2012: 23–24) concludes that “the logics of desire driving these women and men to opt for transnational marriage is [sic] rather complex, transcending both economic motivations and intimate relationships”. Still, even if each individual story has many nuances and layers, I argue that the logics of desire transcend marital arrangements to impact on interactions also in the Thai massage studio, potentially over-determining them.

4.1 Confused affect and shifting indexicalities

Dimitri and Frank both frequent Thai massage studios to treat physical pain induced by intense sport activities. In fact, they exercise together, and it was on Frank’s recommendation that Dimitri called on a specific TMT for his back pain. Dimitri, with whom I conversed in English, is a researcher at a local university in his thirties, originally from Southern Europe. Leading up to the following interaction (Excerpt 1), we were discussing how at times different services were offered under the cover of “massage”. Having this in mind, Dimitri recounts ambivalent impressions when first arriving at the studio recommended by Frank. His own confusion related to the use of signs, as he explains:

Yet, the confusion does not stop with this semiotic marker. In trying to unpack the reasons of why Austrian men might misinterpret massage as “something else”, he states:

4.2 Confused affect as discursive strategy

In the first excerpt, Dimitri recounted how he overcame his confusion, maybe even feeling the need to legitimise entering a massage studio with a semiotic surface indexical of “something else”. Another potential confusion regarding affect is elaborated on further by Frank, an Austrian in his late forties and a self-declared seasoned client of different kinds of massage styles and studios (from sports or Swedish massage to Chinese and Thai massage). He professes to choose specific massage therapists for particular muscular pains related to his sporting activities and positions himself as an expert persona in this regard. I had several conversations with Frank about Thai massage before he agreed to be formally interviewed (in German; translations are all mine). Contrary to Dimitri, who referred to culturally differing interpretations of semiotic markers and pragmatics, Frank locates the source of potential “confusion” on the side of the (male) client simply in being undressed. His confusion thus refers to the act of massage itself:

After a pause of 2 s, Frank muses on the state of being “undressed” and concludes that this alone inevitably entails a “certain erotic thing”; which, however, in his view, is inherent to any massage and not particular to Thai massage. What he does not mention is whether he feels the same way with male massage therapists – a point neither raised by me. At the same time, his argumentation legitimises his reading of the situation as potentially erotic, due to his being undressed – an “issue” probably not occurring when finding himself undressed at the doctor's, for example. As such, this assessment echoes the basic problem of service work on naked or semi-clad bodies that results in “elisions between massage and sex work” (Oerton 2004: 550), clearly positioning this issue as emerging at the power-infused intersection of gender and the ethnic economy.

Even if Frank sets the massage scene as inherently potentially “erotic”, he still voices confusion as to whether and when the interpretive frame shifts from therapy to include sexual pleasure:

In Excerpt 4, Frank openly describes his continuous confusion with regard to desire in the process of a massage. Tellingly, he uses a deflection strategy to distance himself from this confusion – or in fact, from engaging in desire: unlike Dimitri, he does not use the first pronoun, but continues to use the more generic “you” (“du” in German). And, indeed, Frank had told me before that he was often offered an “extra” at different places, but always declined (in spite of his professed attraction to Asian women), as in Austria any paid sexual activity not licenced as prostitution is illegal. In my view, this excerpt clearly shows how inscribed this confused affect related to desire is in accounts of Thai massage. Rather than probing into what happens behind closed doors, I aim to illustrate the implication of the confusion, i.e. the sexualisation of the massage practice and the women, and the discursive casualness with which Frank delivers this. More importantly, he frames it as if it was an intentionally created ambiguity – again, related to the fact that offering paid sexual services is illegal, which prohibits explicit offers on the side of TMT – without considering the possibility that this ambiguity actually could be his imagination. Finally, he construes his confusion about the sexual nature of the embodied practice without considering questions of power. In this vein, the verbalisation of confusion regarding the articulation of desire could – in its extreme – actually serve as a discursive strategy that naturalises gendered sexual abuse or violence. Further, it projects any invitation to desire onto the TMT rather than the clients. The affect in question, as confusing as it is, is thus a patterned and clearly distributed practice involving gendered and ethnicised bodies that are inscribed in specific political economic conditions and logics of desire, which furthermore allows to imagine certain practices and utter certain words. It is with these issues in mind that I turn to the account of the TMT themselves.

4.3 Desire as an intersectional exercise of power

In the countless conversations with both TMT Naa and Dohng, they shared story after story about sexualised desire and inappropriate behaviour from clients and their reactions. Oftentimes they use raunchy humour to discuss these instances among themselves (which they translate from Thai for my benefit), arguably to diffuse their discomfort of being positioned as sex workers. Naa, for instance, has complained repeatedly to me about her situation over the last years. She arrived in Vienna a few years ago after marrying a German living in Austria, and has been working as a TMT since. After her arrival, she haphazardly called on a large Thai massage studio for employment, which hired her immediately due to her training and experience as TMT in Bangkok. As her husband does not approve of her profession (i.e. its reputation), they have gotten into fights repeatedly. Yet, other efforts to find employment have proven futile, as many jobs ask for higher German competences. However, without the energy to study on her own in the studio and without much opportunity to practice her German due to limited interactions (Serwe 2015), she has not managed to improve her linguistic level. She has thus pushed for the possibility to take time off work to attend German classes, even if this is not well received by her colleague Dohng, who remains alone when she attends morning classes. By now, she has retaken the B1-level German course twice and is thinking of taking it again as a refresher. From when we first met, she has confided in me that she will apply for other jobs (ideally in cleaning) once her language competences suffice the demands of the labour market. The following Excerpt 5 recounts a conversation with her in mid-December 2018, in which I tried to understand how she makes sense of the reasons for the taking hold of the logics of desire.

In this narrative, documented in my field notes, Naa clearly holds the precarious economic conditions responsible for the sexualisation of her trade, simultaneously demarcating this experience particularly to Vienna. She claims to have encountered this illegitimate side of her trade only in Vienna, and in blaming the enacting of desire on the local context, she positions herself and her fellow TMT as legitimate professionals. The sexual interpretations and demands voiced by some clients thus become even more prevalent in her lived and recounted experience. According to her, the logics of desire are what drives the clients to probe the TMT’s frame of conduct, sometimes by the use of euphemistic language or, in the extreme case, even by boldly and outright asking for sexual services. This moment can be read as an interactional attempt at meaning-making of a particular embodied affective experience, highly insidious precisely because of its recurrence. Naa’s resigned assessment, “That’s the competition”, implies that her clients approach her inappropriately because of the illegitimate practices enacted by others who are trying to make some money on the side. The emergence of a vicious cycle of supposed supply and demand centring around the inciting and acting on desire each reinforce the other, exposing TMT to its logics, with which Naa, Dohng, and others are forced to deal on a daily basis. Due to the political economic situation, most importantly the linguistic regime of migration and the labour market, it could be even argued that desire has structuring and structured effects in this particular ethnic economy, as it is clearly distributed in interactions that are deeply intersecting gender, ethnicity, thus becoming scripted in terms of power exercise.