ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the processes of learning professionalism and regulation in CAM by offering a geographical reading of training for massage and reflexology. As two types of CAM, massage and reflexology have become more widely practised and consumed over the past 20 years (Andrews, 2003). In particular, moving beyond a specialist medical intervention, their place in mainstream health and wellbeing service consumption has grown significantly. With a ‘rediscovery of the senses’ in consumer culture, a ‘new pleasure in the body’ has been validated (Jutte, 2005: 238, in Paterson, 2007), binding the embodied and the affective. The growth, use and practice of massage and reflexology are just two examples of this sensual commodification. The conceptual territory of this paper lies first and foremost in the literature relating to the pervasive gendering of body work and emotional labour and the recursive relationship between the spaces and experiences of learning bodily and emotional skills for transfer to paid employment. While not wishing to repeat arguments already established (see Wainwright et al., 2010a, 2011b), body work, as elucidated by Wolkowitz (2002, 2006) and defined as work involving interaction between bodies, has been conceptualised through a highly gendered and maternalised discourse of motherhood, care and familial responsibility. Through essentialist and performed (self )constructions of women’s abilities, it is ‘intimately linked with women’s bodily lives through motherhood and nurturance. Because women do this work for babies and children, these activities are generalised as female’ (Twigg, 2000a: 407). Drawing on Hochschild’s formative writings (1983), body work has also been explicitly related to the emotional labour that it more than frequently requires (Gimlin, 2007). For example, Twigg (2000a, 2000b) and Milligan (2000, 2003) have drawn attention to both the physicality and the emotionality of the caring dimensions of body work, pointing to how care is implicitly entangled in gendered meanings of home and identity. Put simply, the more intimate the contact and handling of bodies in a range of settings, the more necessary the sensitive handling of emotions. In the next section, this initial conceptual grounding is tallied with an appraisal of the therapeutic landscapes literature and subsequent limited research looking at the geographies of CAM. Then, with an empirical focus on training for massage and reflexology, we outline the research project which, through a focus on mothers’ participation in training for body work, sought, in
part, to explore the (re)articulation of trainee-practitioner identities through the spatial tactics implicit in the training process and learning environment. This empirical attention is primarily based on focus groups and interviews with mothers participating in reflexology and massage training courses in London further education colleges, and interviews with training providers and tutors in these fields, as detailed below. This interest in training is, we suggest, an important one. At a conceptual level, the processes of training have been largely absent in now numerous appraisals of body work (see Gale, 2007 for a detailed exception). And, we argue here as elsewhere (Wainwright et al., 2010b), a focus on spaces of training enables much insight to be yielded into how bodily and emotional ‘skills’ are learned and practised and how practitioner identity is created and defined. At the empirical level, such an appraisal is politically current given the relentlessness of neo-liberal welfare-towork rhetoric in the UK and beyond, that is actively encouraging training for work. This has been especially the case for mothers, the focus of our research, where an expectation of ‘good’ mothering is now implicitly bound to being economically active (Wainwright et al., 2011a). What is termed the ‘classroom-salon’ lies at the centre of our substantive arguments, and the regulatory and often iterative relationship produced between bodies and space in the learning of professionalism. In particular, the paper moves on to explore some of the tensions brought to bear on trainee-practitioner identity; that is, the need to re-articulate aspects of normative gender and maternal identity whilst simultaneously articulating a new ‘professional’ identity. By tracing some of the dimensions of this learning process, we argue for a more spatially attuned understanding of the work of CAM trainees and practitioners.
