Markets and politics: Public and private relations in the case of prostitution: Markets and politics: Public and private relations in the case of prostitution (original) (raw)
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Labour and Industry, 2020
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In recent years, prostitution increasingly has been recast as a form of 'sex work', which directs attention to both the work itself and the larger occupational milieu in which it takes place. This article examines several aspects of the work environment, including important variations between different types of workers (on the street and in indoor venues), relations between workers and customers, and what is known about the role of various managers involved in recruitment, socialization, and control over workers. The article highlights areas in which further research will provide a more complete picture of sex work in different kinds of contexts.
Book Review: The Subject of Prostitution: Sex Work, Law and Social Theory
Social & Legal Studies, 2017
Jane Scoular's book is a tour de force. It is the book those in the field of sexual regulation and the law have been waiting for to reignite and redirect a stagnated debate. Scoular's principle objective is to intervene in contemporary prostitution politics, which privileges law as the solution to the 'problem' of prostitution. The subject of the legal regulation of prostitution has received considerable academic and public policy attention. It is striking, however, that little has been written about how law matters in contemporary sex work. Against a backdrop of unprecedented legal reform across national and international contexts that purport to 'protect' sex workers and criminalize those who purchase their sexual services, Jane Scoular's recent book provides a ground breaking and in-depth analysis of the modern subject of prostitution. Drawing on post-structural approaches to the 'subject' and in particular Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality, Scoular concentrates on how law plays a constitutive role in how prostitution emerges as a 'problem' of governance. Over the course of six chapters, she pursues 'a genealogy of the modern subject of prostitution' to trace and analyse changes in how law works in social relations. And ultimately how this impacts on prostitution as a social practice. Scoular attempts to unsettle law from its hegemonic position in prostitution politics in specific epochs and develop the 'first post-structural account of both the sociopolitical subject of prostitution and of law' (p. 17). Scoular argues by understanding law as embedded in social relations we can shift our focus beyond 'what law says it does' to 'what it actually does' in the context of prostitution regulation (p. 19). Scoular begins her genealogy of the subject of prostitution and law in Chapters 2 and 3 when she examines the historical, political and ideological terrain in which prostitution becomes a 'social' problem in the Victorian era. One of the strengths of this book is Scoular's close and critical analysis of the key role law plays in making prostitution the object of governmentality. In this regard, she highlights how the Contagious Diseases Acts 1866 and 1869 illuminate not only how law constitutes the subject of prostitution but also a much wider system of social control. Scoular demonstrates how the language of governmentality, with its emphasis on creating 'populations' to be governed, not only transforms legal power into mechanisms of governmentality but also makes prostitution a distinct legal category and inscribes a disciplinary regime on prostitutes' bodies. She recognizes also the strategic possibilities prostitution as a problem of governance creates
Gender & History, 2004
This article deals with the trope of the victimised, female body in feminist debates on the selling of sexual services. The notion of ‘violence’ is central to the construction of a key axis of the debates. The article explores these issues by discussing five recent and historical feminist works on prostitution/sex work, and touches on works which address methodological issues of gathering information on an activity which is, by definition, illicit, stigmatised and socio‐politically marginalised. The essay brings out several tensions in the framing of the present debates, especially regarding the varied contexts of ‘the West’ and the ‘non‐West’, as well as issues of macropolitical change, including economic globalisation. It concludes with the ways in which the texts serve to disaggregate the concepts of ‘sex work’ and ‘violence’.
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Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2002
This essay critically explores contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution. It argues that to develop analyses which are relevant to the experience of more than just a small minority of ‘First World’ women, those who are concerned with prostitution as a form of work need to look beyond liberal discourse on property and contractual consent for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of ‘sex work’.
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THEORY AND SOCIETY, 2024
Apart from polarized feminist theorizing, which is abundant in the literature, much of the scholarship on sex work is atheoretical and based on single-case studies. This paper argues that theorization can be advanced by systematic comparison of multiple settings and types of prostitution at the structural, interactional, and experiential levels. I show that certain structural and interactional characteristics, specific to each sector, can be linked to corresponding patterns in participants' routine or modal experiences and meanings. Drawing on the empirical literature, I show that some of the most important meanings revolve around the degree to which a sector is conducive to rebranding and decommodification by participants, bordering on normalization. In the sociology of deviance, this is known as norm "neutralization" and "deviance disavowal." It is argued that the social organization of one of the sectors is most favorable to destigmatization by the actors involved.