Touching Encounters: Sex, Work, and Male-for-Male Internet Escorting

by Kevin Walby

Often depicted as deviant or pathological by public health researchers, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, male-with-male sex and sex work is, in fact, an increasingly mainstream pursuit. Based on a qualitative investigation of the practices involved in male-with-male—or m4m—Internet escorting, Touching Encounters is the first book to explicitly address how masculinity and sexuality shape male commercial sex in this era of Internet communications.

 

By looking closely at the sex and work of male escorts, Kevin Walby tries to reconcile the two extremes of m4m sex—the stereotypical idea of a quick cash transaction and the tendency toward friendship and mutuality. In doing so, Walby draws on the work of Foucault to make visible the play of power in these physical and commercial relations between men. At once a revelation to the sociology of work and a much-needed critical engagement with queer theory, Touching Encounters responds to calls from across the social sciences to connect Foucault with sociologies of sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Walby does this and more, retying this sexual practice back to society at large.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT

219 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2012

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting anecdotes, but despite the deep interaction with various strands of sociology it manages to feel thin, somehow.

[willowdog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scholarly and well-referenced from Foucault to queer theory, this analysis of the new normal of male-for-male internet escorting documents the change in escorting in the computer age.