Freedom And Prostitution

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION proposes the dream of a world without work, without money, without gender, while imagining forms of survival now for those who often have little to no choices, refuse to submit to the demands of tedious underpaid or unwaged labor, an abusive partner, or seek a life beyond work. Sex work is not a "better" type of labor but a proposal for the abolition of all work.

Prostitution is still the subject of intense controversy among feminists but theoretical and political analyses are often only loosely grounded in empirical research. This book offers new perspectives on prostitution based on wide-ranging research in nine countries and extensive work with prostitute users.

Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods. The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.

A generation ago, most people did not know how ubiquitous and grave human trafficking was. Now many people agree that the $35.7 billion business is an appalling violation of human rights. But when confronted with prostitution, many people experience an odd disconnect because prostitution is shrouded in myths, among them the claims that ôprostitution is inevitable,ö and ôprostitution is a job or service like any other.ö In Not a Choice, Not a Job, Janice Raymond challenges both the myths and their perpetrators. Raymond demonstrates that prostitution is not sex but sexual exploitation, and that legalizing and decriminalizing the system of prostitutionùas opposed to the prostituted womenùpromotes sex trafficking, expands the sex industry, and invites organized crime. Specifically, Raymond exposes how legalized prostitution in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, and Nevada worsens crime and endangers women. In contrast, she reveals, when governments work to prevent the demand for prostitution by prosecuting pimps, brothels, and prostitution usersùas in Norway, Sweden, and Icelandùtrafficking does not increase, women are better protected, and fewer men buy sex. Raymond expands the boundaries of scholarship in womenÆs studies, making this book indispensable to human rights advocates around the world.

A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue. Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,” and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition. Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers’ rights as human rights. Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.

Prostitution is still the subject of intense controversy among feminists but theoretical and political analyses are often only loosely grounded in empirical research. This book offers new perspectives on prostitution based on wide-ranging research in nine countries and extensive work with prostitute users.

Capitalism on Campus examines the university’s journey into market hands and the sexual sell-off of students, which has come with it. It raises critical questions about the forces which conjoin higher education to both sex work and declining academic freedom. In so doing it questions the role our institutions of learning have in the cultivation of resistance to capitalism. This is a call to rediscover the emancipatory potential of knowledge.

In this time of heated debate over pornography in general and prostitution in particular, Vern and Bonnie Bullough present a fascinating look at the social and historical context of the "world's oldest profession." Women and Prostitution is a panorama of the forms and practices prostitution has assumed in many cultures over many centuries. Based on the assumption that one cannot understand prostitution without first understanding the role of women in society, this volume is the first comprehensive treatment of the historical, sociological, and anthropological background of prosititution. The authors expose the inextricable interweaving of scores of cultural dilemmas: women as property, pornography and the fear of sexuality, religion and promiscuity, sex and social class, and the control of venereal disease. Women and Prostitution conveys the tragedy and humor, the fortitude and cunning, the veniality and generosity, the real and counterfeit sensuality, and the hypocrisy and pathos that surround the lives of prostitutes. The beautiful, the powerful, the talented, and the most outrageous are here: Lais, Tamar, Pompadour, Du Barry, Emma Hamilton, Lola Montez and Calamity Jane. But in addition to these tales of the illustrious, these pages are filled with the experiences of the anonymous and the abused. Women and Prostitution is important reading for feminists, police, religious leaders, civil libertarians, the general public, and prostitutes themselves. All will benefit from this useful, sympathetic and illuminating book.