Genderplay: Reclaiming and Reconfiguring Femininity through the Gendered Labor Practices of Transmasculine Sex Workers

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the gendered labor of transmasculine sex workers as they navigate client requests for genderplay, an eroticized form of gender misrecognition. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transgender men and AFAB nonbinary sex workers, I conceptualize this specific form of gendered labor as reclaimed and reconfigured femininity, a skilled labor process that can produce unique pleasures and pains for this group of workers. Accomplishing reclaimed and reconfigured femininity requires negotiating the demands, anxieties, and erotic needs of clients, which can come into conflict with their identities as transmasculine people. Despite the potential costs of such investments of emotional labor, I find that this process can become a subversive practice of self-exploration and gender-making, as well as a source of pleasure for the workers themselves. The gendered consequences of paid genderplay are more complicated and even contradictory than they first appear. Although the process of reconfigured and reclaimed femininity described here is, in many ways, unique to sex work or to transmasculine experiences of work, it also offers fresh insight for sociological analysis of gender, labor, and pleasure.