Bodywork Boundaries: Power, Politics and Professionalism in Therapeutic Massage

In the last decade or so, complementary and alternative medicine generally, and therapeutic bodywork in particular, has been attempting to enhance its professional status and standing. By focusing upon the sex/gender dimensions of therapeutic massage and the wider historical, cultural and legal contexts in which such work is situated, this article explores and analyses the discursive formations and practices which women therapeutic massage practitioners deploy in the course of their attempts to achieve professional recognition. Drawing upon both primary and secondary data, it is argued that particular difficulties pertain in the case of the professionalization of therapeutic massage. Because of the widespread elisions between massage and sex work, women therapeutic massage practitioners have to mark out their professional distance from clients by deploying professional identifications and by using boundary‐setting devices or techniques which act to distinguish them from sex workers. This article explores these discursive formations and practices and argues that they act to create near‐intractable problems for women massage practitioners. The article concludes that, because these issues are not commonly acknowledged in much of the academic, policy or practitioner‐orientated literature, the neglect of sex/gender in the case of therapeutic massage has consequences not only for the professionaliza‐tion project of this particular therapeutic modality but for the ways in which various body work occupations in which women predominate tend to be seen as marginal and illegitimate ‘professions’.