Selling sex in order to migrate: the end of the migratory dream? (original) (raw)
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LOVA 2017 Ethnographies of Gender & Mobility - Panel #5 'Migration and sex work'
Prostitution is a well-known universal social phenomenon, from anywhere and at all times, that attracts many migrants. Yet sex work is clearly not evenly integrated into society. Moreover, worldwide sex workers are on the move seeking new sources of income in the sex industry. Generally, sexual migration involves the temporary emigration of a person out of pure economic motives and the idea to return to the country of origin with the earned income after a time. However, in case of transsexual migration (the emigration of transgendered people), the reason for migration is often highly intertwined with gender identity and sexual orientation. The purpose of this anthropological and phenomenological research project has been to find out who the Latin American transgender sex workers in Antwerp are, why they work in the sex industry, which journey brought them to Europe, how they experience life, how they feel about their bodies, identities and sexuality, and how art is used as a creative coping strategy to escape their remarkable reality. In this case study of Latin American migrants selling sex in Antwerp's prostitution industry, it became clear that as migrants they live with a triple stigma: being a sex worker, being a migrant, and being a transgender. Nevertheless, they experience life conditions better in Europe, as the political and religious ideas in society are opener to tolerance than in their respective home countries.
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2008
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Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking
Based on original ethnographic work and interviews with migrant women from Eastern Europe in street sex work in Italy, Rutvica’s book shows that a perspective that identifies migrant women's situation in the sex sector with sex trafficking is misleading. It equates trafficking with involuntary migration and does not allow for the complexity of desires, decisions and careful planning that go into women’s migration projects to emerge. Additionally, it hides the role of EU states' immigration, residency and employment policies in creating conditions that make migrants vulnerable to labour exploitation in the sex or other informal sectors. The term sex trafficking hides more than it actually reveals about working lives of migrant women in the sex industry and about how conditions of illegality, exploitation and vulnerability arise. These issues, Rutvica suggests, need to be viewed in relation to a wider picture: European citizenship policy. The category of the victim of trafficking limits the way migrant women are conceived, portraying them in a passive light, and denying their rights as active agents and political actors. Anti-trafficking policies need equally to be considered with a critical eye as these often overlap with restrictive border, visa and residency regulations that limit migrants' labour mobility and access to citizenship. This in turn perpetuates inequalities between citizens and migrants in wider Europe.
Mobile Orientations An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders, 2018
Despite continued public and legislative concern about sex trafficking across international borders, the actual lives of the individuals involved—and, more importantly, the decisions that led them to sex work—are too often overlooked. With Mobile Orientations, Nicola Mai shows that, far from being victims of a system beyond their control, many contemporary sex workers choose their profession as a means to forge a path toward fulfillment. Using a bold blend of personal narrative and autoethnography, Mai provides intimate portrayals of sex workers from sites including the Balkans, the Maghreb, and West Africa who decided to sell sex as the means to achieve a better life. Mai explores the contrast between how migrants understand themselves and their work and how humanitarian and governmental agencies conceal their stories, often unwittingly, by addressing them all as helpless victims. The culmination of two decades of research, Mobile Orientations sheds new light on the desires and ambitions of migrant sex workers across the world.
The synergy between restrictive sex work and migration policies targeting sex workers in France
2021
The continuity of repressive legislation concerning sex work in France, from the legal measures against street soliciting (2003) to the law penalising sex workers’ clients (beginning April 13th, 2016) has created a socio-political and economic context in which the needs and rights of those working in the sex sector have been undermined at a fundamental level for the sake of the ultimate goal of abolishing prostitution. Over the past fifteen years in France, there has been a convergence of political interests and concerns that turned sex work into an important ‘social problem’ to solve (Calderaro & Giametta 2019). Among the dominant discourses on sex work in France, the heterogeneity of stakeholders’ positions often makes its analysis complex. In fact, diverse concerns about public order, gendered violence as well as migrants’ numbers have made the control of sex work an important political issue. This visibility in the political sphere, however, has obfuscated the socio-anthropological reality of sex work and those who act within it.
Escaping the exception: Migrant sex workers between subjectification and excess
Special Issue of Greek Review of Social Research, 'Displacements and emplacements: Migration, gender, and precarious subjectivities in conditions of aggressive neoliberalism' (A. Athanasiou and Y. Tsimouris eds.), 2013
The paper examines the play of multiple, displacing and emplacing regimes of subjectification as they impinge upon the life experiences of migrant Nigerian sex workers, as well as the ways in which the women's subjectivities might exceed such regimes. Dispositifs such as those of migration policy and humanitarianism, of bonded labour, existential precariousness and institutionalised predation in neoliberal economies, but also of gender and kinship, interweave through complex genealogies that do not yield unequivocal victim-subjects or, on the contrary, subjects enforcing exploitation and abuse from a position of power. Likewise, neither mobility nor stasis, or border crossings and settled lives are straightforwardly mappable on excess or constraint: migration and return are experienced ambiguously, alternatively as liberating and constraining. They are described as openings and closures, sometimes in the same breath. Rather, the paper argues, hope and excess may emerge, unexpected, from any situation, or be quashed in contexts in which they may be expected to thrive.