Is sex work (specifically, prostitution) vulnerable to technological unemployment? Several authors have argued that it is. They claim that the advent of sophisticated sexual robots will lead to the displacement of human prostitutes, just as, say, the advent of sophisticated manufacturing robots have displaced many traditional forms of factory labour. But are they right? In this article, I critically assess the argument that has been made in favour of this displacement hypothesis. Although I grant the argument a degree of (...) credibility, I argue that the opposing hypothesis -- that prostitution will be resilient to technological unemployment -- is also worth considering. Indeed, I argue that increasing levels of technological unemployment in other fields may well drive more people into the sex work industry. Furthermore, I argue that no matter which hypothesis you prefer -- displacement or resilience -- you can make a good argument for the necessity of a basic income guarantee, either as an obvious way to correct for the precarity of sex work, or as a way to disincentivise those who may be drawn to prostitution. (shrink)

In this "for and against" book, ethicists Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan debate the criminalization of sex work. Watson argues for a sex equality approach to prostitution in which buyers are criminalized and sellers are decriminalized, known as the Nordic Model. Flanigan argues that sex work should be fully decriminalized because decriminalization ensures respect for sex workers' and clients' rights, and is more effective than alternative policies.

Sex work’s governance throughout the Commonwealth has historically been animated by the objective of rendering the sale of sex, and those who engage in such transactions, invisible. To achieve this end, lawmakers have characterized public, viewable sex work as a nuisance meriting criminalization. Although prohibition results in unequivocal perils for sex workers, governance strategies in this domain remain centred on criminalization. A new law in Canada, Bill C-36: the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, exemplifies this point. (...) While Bill C-36 purports to shift criminal law’s focus from sex workers to their clients and profiteers, it continues to expose sex workers who work in public view to criminal prosecution. It thereby preserves sex work’s characterization as a nuisance, offensive to a community’s senses and deserving of proscription. Although Bill C-36 proclaims to promote dignity and equality rights, it prioritizes the interests of communities over those of sex workers. In the result, this new law will revoke sex workers’ social and political citizenship and thwart their personal security. (shrink)

Since the publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat in 1990, activist and writer Carol J. Adams (2000 [1990]) has put forth a feminist defence of veganism based on the argument that meat consumption and violence against animals are structurally related to violence against women, and especially to pornography and prostitution. Adams’ work has been influential in the growing fields of animal studies and posthumanism, where her research is frequently cited as the prime example of vegan feminism. However, her (...) particular radical feminist framework, including her anti-pornography and anti-prostitution arguments, are rarely acknowledged or critiqued. This article challenges the premises of Adams’ argument, demonstrating that her version of vegan feminism is based upon an unsubstantiated comparison between violence against women and violence against other-than-human animals, and on the silencing and exclusion of sex workers as subjects. The article contests the limited reading of Adams, and of feminism, offered in some key works in animal studies and posthumanism, at the same time that it recognises the need to challenge the anthropocentrism evident in much feminist theory. By way of alternative approaches to the sexual politics of veganism, the article highlights the interventions of artist and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross, proposing that her situated and embodied commitment to animal rights brings sex worker agency into the story, while resisting simple comparisons among different forms of violence. The concerns raised by Ross overlap in compelling ways with recent research in performance studies and labour history, bringing the question of work and workers, animal and human, to the fore. These studies point towards a potentially more useful framework than that of Adams for understanding the human violence suffered by different species, including those destined to be eaten by people. (shrink)

A number of theorists have defended the legalization and destigmatization of sex work by arguing that sex work is analogous to other kinds of labour that are socially accepted and even valorized. In contrast, one reason that anti-sex work feminist theorists have rejected the analogy between prostitution and other jobs, including professions that are potentially exploitative and dangerous, is that sex is tied up with personal identity and integrity in a way that other activities are not. This (...) makes the selling of one’s body or the use of parts of one’s body for sexual services psycho-sexually harmful in a way that distinguishes it from other forms of labour involving the sale or use of one’s body parts. This essay argues that Foucault’s work on sexuality helps to bring together what seems right about both sides of this debate. Drawing on Foucault, we can explain the fact that sex is experienced as intrinsic to identity in the modern West, as well as lend support to the view that this is a contingent and undesirable state of affairs. Moreover, this essay argues that Foucault’s proposal for desexualization suggests a way out of one of the main occupational hazards associated with sex work. (shrink)

The relationships between female sex workers and their noncommercial male partners are typically viewed as sites of HIV risk rather than meaningful unions. This ethnographic case study presents a nuanced portrayal of the relationship between Cindy and Beto, a female sex worker who injects drugs and her intimate, noncommercial partner who live in Tijuana, Mexico. On the basis of ethnographic research in Tijuana and our long-term involvement in a public health study, we suggest that emotions play a central role in (...) sex workers’ relationships and contribute in complex ways to each partner's health. We conceptualize Cindy and Beto's relationship as a “dangerous safe haven” in which HIV risk behaviors such as unprotected sex and syringe sharing convey notions of love and trust and help sustain emotional unity amid broader uncertainties but nevertheless carry very real health risks. Further attention to how emotions shape vulnerable couples’ health remains a task for anthropology. (shrink)

Sex work or prostitution marks a controversial topic for Protestant sexual ethics. It is also a multifaceted phenomenon because it can occur in very different forms: the spectrum ranges from poverty, emergency and procurement prostitution to the self-determined and insured sex worker with all imaginable shades in between. In the current economic system, goods and services are exchanged, traded, sold, acquired and paid for, so sex work can also be understood as work. For the purposes of this (...) article, we will therefore start from an understanding of sex work as care work. Care work can be understood as the satisfaction of needs and interests of third parties and the self. If sex work is discussed as care work, this has a variety of consequences. These include the fact that questions of vulnerability and integrity come to the fore. Integrity can be comprehended as self-realisation or autonomy and thus as potentially vulnerable, taking up Axel Honneth’s early reflections on the issue of recognition. Integrity in Axel Honneth’s sense can - according to a first approximation - play a role for sex work on three levels: physical or corporeal level, structural level and lifestyle or way of life level. Finally, the essay discusses the concept of negotiated or consensual morality as a contribution of Protestant ethics. (shrink)

Popular representations of third-world sex workers as sex slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist legal reforms that are harmful and ineffective, and public health initiatives that provide only marginal protection of sex workers' rights. In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets in (...) India.Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective. (shrink)

During the late nineties, leading voices of the sex worker rights movement began to publicly question queer theory’s virtual silence on the subject of prostitution and sex work. However, this attempt by sex workers to “come out of the closet” into the larger queer theoretical community has thus far failed to bring much attention to sex work as an explicitly queer issue. Refusing the obvious conclusion—that queer theory’s silence on sex work somehow proves its insignificance to this (...) field of inquiry—I trace in Foucault’s oeuvre signs of an alternate queer genealogy of prostitution and sex work. Both challenging and responding to long-standing debates about prostitution within feminist theory, I offer a new queer genealogy of sex work that aims to move beyond the rigid oppositions that continue to divide theorists of sexuality and gender. Focusing specifically on History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality Volume I, I make the case for an alternate genealogy of sex work that takes seriously both the historical construction of prostitution and the lived experience of contemporary sex workers. (shrink)

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it (...) also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women and the freedom of others. (shrink)

There has been an exponential rise in use of the term vulnerability across a number of political and policy arenas, including child protection, sexual offences, poverty, development, care for the elderly, patient autonomy, globalisation, war, public health and ecology. Yet despite its increasing deployment, the exact meaning and parameters of this concept remain somewhat elusive. In this article, we explore the interaction of two very different strategies—one in which vulnerability is relied upon by those seeking improved social justice as a (...) mechanism by which to identify, problematise and compel state responses to a universal condition of precarious dependency, and the other in which it is used as a category of neo-liberal governance which legitimates state encroachment whilst constructing ‘vulnerable’ individuals as ‘risk-managers’ who must behave ‘responsibly’ in the face of disadvantage. We suggest that the co-existence of these divergent approaches highlights the fluidity and malleability of the concept of vulnerability. Using sex work as a specific case study, we explore the ways in which vulnerability bears multiple meanings, and has been used in recent times in the furtherance of moralistic and regressive agendas, which collude with, rather than challenge, state power. Without seeking to reject the label or normative import of vulnerability, we call, therefore, for a more circumspect approach to its usage, and a more critical evaluation of recent claims which hail it as a mechanism, preferable to the conventional use of equality paradigms, by which to secure progressive feminist outcomes. (shrink)

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it (...) also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women and the freedom of others. (shrink)

: In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but (...) it also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women (who may choose to engage in sex work) and the freedom of others (who may be harmed by the contribution of such work to the social construction of categories such as "women" and "sex"). (shrink)

In Sri Lanka’s armed conflict, gender, sexuality, and sex work are intermeshed with militarized nationalism. Militarization entrenches gender performances and heteronormative schemes while enabling women to transgress these—whether as combatants or as sex workers. Familiarly, in this nationalist encounter, women are expected to safeguard culture, notably through proper dress and sexual conduct. Sexualactivity that challenges containment arouses anxiety because loyalty to military groupor communal boundary can be compromised. Drawing on three examples—adress codecall by a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (...) women’s wing, consequences for a woman alleged to be a sex worker, and the public stripping of an alleged suicide bomber at a military checkpoint—this article explores how gendered behaviors and sexualities marked as culture are constructed and controlled in the interests of militarized, nationalist projects; how women can be both agents and objects of these controls; and the implications for women who refuse to comply. (shrink)

In the first volume of the History of Sexuality , Michel Foucault states in passing that prostitution and pornography, like the sexual sciences of medicine and psychiatry, are involved in the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse implantation. Against an influential misinterpretation of this passage on the part of film studies scholar Linda Williams, this paper takes up Foucault’s claim and attempts to explain the mechanism through which the sex industry, and pornography in particular, functions analogously to the sexual sciences (...) in terms of the normalizing form of power that Foucault describes. Whereas Williams sets the question of prostitution aside, and argues that pornography must be a confessional discourse for Foucault, this paper argues that consumption rather than confession is the mechanism through which both prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities within a disciplinary system of power. (shrink)

The concept of ‘human dignity’ sits at the heart of international human rights law and a growing number of national constitutions and yet its meaning is heavily contested and contingent. I aim to supplement the theoretical literature on dignity by providing an empirical study of how the concept is used in the specific context of legal discourse on sex work. I will analyse jurisprudence in which commercial sex was declared as incompatible with human dignity, focussing on the South African (...) Constitutional Court case of S v Jordan and the Indian Supreme Court case of Budhadev Karmaskar v State of West Bengal. I will consider how these courts conceptualise dignity and argue that their conclusions on the undignified nature of sex work are predicated on particular sexual norms that privilege emotional and relational intimacy. In light of the stigma faced by sex workers I will explore how a discourse, proclaiming sex work as beneath human dignity, may impact on the way that sex workers are perceived and represented culturally, arguing that it reinforces stigma. I will go on to examine how sex workers subvert the notion that commercial sex is undignified, and resist stigma, by campaigning for the right to sell sex with dignity. I will demonstrate that an alternative legal approach to dignity and sex work is possible, where the two are not considered as inherently incompatible, concluding with thoughts on the risks and benefits of using ‘dignity talk’ in activism and campaigns for sex work law reform. (shrink)

This article adds to the debate on digital labour by including sexual labour, a feminised form of work that is traditionally excluded from official labour statistics and mainstream labour politics because of the embedded sociolegal, cultural and political context that defines female sexual labour as illegitimate work. This exclusion has been extended to digital labour politics. This article draws on a four-year multi-method qualitative study in the UK, which in part focused on sex work mediated and managed (...) by digital platforms. Drawing on and adding to the literature on women’s digital entrepreneurialism, I argue that digital sex workers embody an ‘entrepreneurial subjectivity’ and narrate ideals of flexibility and choice. However, on closer inspection, digital platforms shape and manage the labour so that agency over labour practices and processes become coerced choices. (shrink)

With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified (...) ethical concern, must be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice. (shrink)

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals (...) that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives. (shrink)

This article presents insights from a research project on sex work that took place in the Caribbean region during 1997–8. First it briefly summarizes common themes in historical and contemporary studies of sex work in the region, then describes the aims, methodology, and main trends of the project. It pays particular attention to the differences between definitions and experiences of sex work by female and male sex workers and of male and female sex tourists, as well as (...) describing conditions in the Caribbean sex trade. Finally the article identifies some implications of the complexity in the region that were uncovered through the research project for feminist theorizing about sex work. (shrink)

The Policing and Crime Act 2009 introduced radical reforms relating to the regulation of sex work. In particular, section 14 criminalised paying for sexual services of a prostitute subjected to force. This article will provide a close and critical reading of the official texts relating to this new offence through a discourse theory developed from the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s insights, it will be argued that the official texts relating to section 14 problematically construct the (...) subject of prostitution in a way which maintains and perpetuates certain partial and idealised identities. However, it will be argued that the law will inevitably fail and that more inclusive and productive measures need to be adopted in order to deal effectively with prostitution. (shrink)

In this study, we elaborate connections among gender, structure, and practice to suggest how social structural relations shape social sexual practice and, in the process, reshape gender relations. Using survey data from a study of a community mobilization intervention, we investigate the connection between institutional arrangements and condom use practice in sexual encounters with commercial clients and intimate partners among 410 women engaged in sex trade in a semiurban town in southern India. Multinomial logistic regression analysis uncovers the effects of (...) 16 measures of gendered structural relations in three contexts—livelihood resources, household circumstances, and community mobilization intervention priorities. We compare women who practice either consistent or inconsistent condom use with both clients and partners with a reference group of women who practice consistent condom use with clients but not with partners. Results reveal the importance of household and community relations for consistent safer sex practice over and above the organization of sex trade. Our analysis advances gender theory in two interrelated ways: We contribute to gender theorizing in the implementation of health interventions, and to gender change more generally by thinking through possibilities emerging from recursive influences between reordered institutional configurations and altered expectations in interaction. (shrink)