In Strangers’ Hands: Thai Massage Services in Slovenia

Abstract

This article looks at the Thai massage industry in Slovenia and its impact on the perception of Thai women workers among users of the service. The arrival of Thai massage salons in Slovenia presents an aspect of global ‘body work’, which has increasingly relied on the labour of migrant women from the global South. In Slovenia, however, the presence of Thai female labour is a relatively new development, as is migration from Asia more broadly. In our analysis, we focus on the cultural aspects of the encounter between the providers and users of the service, as it unfolds in the micro setting of the massage salons. We argue that the closeness of the encounter between the two bodies – the worker’s and the consumer’s – complicates the concept of the modern stranger, as it is usually attached to the (male) migrant in the public space. Moreover, the intimate contact with the migrant worker confuses the hierarchies of gender, race and ethnicity and shifts the location of power and vulnerability. Our findings are then placed within the broader frame of contemporary post-socialist Slovene society to ask how this particular experience of body work may coincide with, or contest, local attitudes towards global migrants.