Producing The Acceptable Sex Worker

Producing the Acceptable Sex Worker considers how sex work is produced in news media narratives, a site where much of the general public draws its understanding of the industry in the absence of lived interaction with it. Taking New Zealand as a case study, this book considers an emerging discourse of acceptability for some sex workers, primarily those who do low-volume indoor work. Their acceptability is established in comparison with other kinds of sex workers, resulting in a redistribution but not a reduction of stigma. The conditions attached to acceptability reflect persistent anxieties aboutsex work: workers who are acceptable must give the impression that the sexual labour of the job is enjoyable and virtually indistinguishable from their personal life, eliding the work involved. Unacceptable workers have existing marginalisations magnified by their association with the industry, with migrant sex workers produced as devious or exploited, and transgender women’s involvement with the industry used to deny them the right to public space. The conditions attached to acceptability reveal how neoliberal discourses of choice, desire, authenticity, and personal responsibility inform the formation of sex work in the public eye.

This book examines the ways that brothels are managed under decriminalisation in New Zealand. New Zealand decriminalised sex work in 2003 with the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act, making it the first country to do so. Decriminalisation situates brothels as ‘businesses like any other’ and creates a legislative platform for better working conditions for sex workers. Nevertheless, we have limited understanding of how brothels are managed in New Zealand. Drawing on interviews with brothel operators and sex workers, this book explores how the law is understood and implemented, how brothel operators position their businesses, and how they seek legitimacy in a historically stigmatised sector. It also examines the rules and norms by which operators manage their businesses and the possibilities for sex workers to consent to commercial sexual services in the context of neoliberal norms of work and of managers who expect them to be professionalised, responsibilised and productive.

This book provides a contemporary collection of key works that chart new and ongoing terrain on student sex work. It brings together experienced researchers, activists, practitioners, early career researchers and those with lived experience of doing sex work in the university setting from across the globe. The book addresses three core areas: Activism, Ideology and Exclusion; Motivations and Experiences; and University Policy, Practice and Service Delivery. This collection represents significant theoretical, methodological and policy and practice contributions within sex work studies. These new perspectives contribute to our existing knowledge, introduce new directions for scholarship and prompt new and exciting questions about how higher education students’ participation in sex work can be researched, understood and responded to in an ethical, non-stigmatising approach. The book will be of interest to students, researchers and service providers and given the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters, the book has a cross-disciplinary appeal.

New Zealand’s relatively recent decriminalisation of sex work and its unusual success in combatting COVID-19 have both attracted international media interest. This accessibly written book uses the lens of news media coverage to consider the pandemic’s impacts on both sex workers and public perceptions of the industry. Analysing the stigmatisation of sex work in both short- and long-term contexts, the book addresses the impacts of intersectional oppressions or marginalisations on sex workers, and the ways sex work advocacy relates to other social justice movements. It unpicks how New Zealand’s decriminalisation approach functions under stress, offering valuable information for advocates, activists and scholars.

The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality, and Culture is an intersectional, diverse, and comprehensive collection essential for students and researchers examining the intersection of sexuality and culture. The book seeks to reflect established theories while anticipating future developments within gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. A range of international contributors, including leaders in their field, provide insights into dominant and marginalised subjects. Comprising over 30 chapters, the volume is comprised into five thematic parts: Identifying, Embodying, Making, Doing, and Resisting. Topics explored include homonormativity, poetry, video games, menstruation, fatness, disability, sex toys, sex work, BDSM, dating apps, body modifications, and politics and activism. This is an important and unique collection aimed at scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners across cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.

This book explores ‘sex work’ in Nepal as a social and analytical category. Narrating stories of those subsumed under such definition, it examines changes as well as continuities characterising socio-cultural norms and perceptions through an analysis of sexual consumption. It also highlights the ways in which the development sector, media, and local community discourses frame ‘sex work’ as a distinct category. How does the work of development aid projects affect the understanding of the sex worker category? How are visual and media images employed to mark spaces of perdition in the Nepalese urban setting and what forms of imagination do they trigger? How are intimate practices and relations transformed by imported notions of love, and how do standards of propriety related to such interactions shift? This book attempts to answer some of these questions. An in-depth and intimate ethnography, the book deconstructs the sex worker category against the backdrop of global influences within local urban surroundings and points to the contradictions therein. Furthermore, through thorough descriptions of the experiences, agency, decision-making processes, and lives of those labelled as sex workers, the book challenges concepts such as deviance and victimhood. It proposes a counternarrative by rethinking ideas of gender, objectification, marginality, symbolic violence, and discrimination. This book will greatly interest researchers and scholars in women and gender studies, sociology and social anthropology, South Asian studies and social sciences, as well as NGOs and those involved in the development sector.

Presents essays by feminists of theory and literature that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today.

This volume is the result of the many years the authors have spent conducting ethnographic field research with sex workers, conversing with other researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, developing a deep sense of empathy for the sex worker participants in the research as well as the colleagues who carry out this work with the goal of advancing social justice. They have a combined total of twenty-five years’ experience carrying out research with sex workers, and this extensive period of time has given them ample opportunity to reflect upon the topic of ethics. Sex work, defined as the exchange of sexual or sexualized intimacy for money or something of value, encompasses a wide range of legal and illegal behaviors that present researchers with key ethical challenges explored in the volume. These ethical challenges include: · Research methodology · Distinguishing research from activism · Navigating the politically and ideologically charged environments in which researchers must remain constantly attuned to the legal and public policy implications of their work · Possibilities for participatory sex work research processes · Strategies for incorporating participants in a variety of collaborative ways Sex work presents a unique set of challenges that are not always well understood by those working outside of anthropology and disciplines closely related to it. This book serves an important function by honestly and openly reviewing strategies for overcoming these ethical challenges with the end goal of producing path-breaking research that actively incorporates the perspectives of research participants on their own terms. Ever attuned to the reality that research on sex work remains a deeply political act, Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches aspires to begin a dialogue about the meanings and practices ascribed to ethics in a fraught environment. Drawing upon a review of published scholarly and activist work on the subject, as well as on interviews with researchers, social service providers, and sex workers themselves, this volume is an unprecedented contribution to the literature that will engage researchers across a variety of disciplines, such as academics and researchers in anthropology, sociology, criminal justice, and public health, as well as activists and policymakers.