ABSTRACT
This chapter presents research that investigates the everyday lives of sex workers in Dongguan—China's sex city. Prostitution has become an important feature of theorising Chinese urbanism in recent years alongside increasing interest in bodies, gender and encounters. Encounters between female prostitutes and male clients effect meaning and experience of urban life, by involving commercial transactions, female chastity, and immoral bodies. Strangers have always constituted urban life. In Simmel's theorisation, the stranger is an essential element of urban society and his or her position as a full-fledged member involves 'both being outside it and confronting it'. Bauman reminds that all societies generate strangers, but different societies produce diverse kind of strangers. The term 'encountering strangers' to denote conditions where sex workers have transient, but intimate, encounters with their clients, their friends, and the city itself.
