Sex Workers In The Maritimes Talk Back

Sex workers are often the "objects" of study for academics and policy makers. Theories about their lives and the policies that affect their work are usually developed without input from the sex workers themselves, as they are rarely seen as capable of analyzing the social and political world in which they work. In this book, however, sex workers set the tone. Leslie Ann Jeffrey and Gayle MacDonald interview sex workers in three Maritime cities and those who work around them: police, health-care providers, community workers/advocates, members of neighbourhood associations, and politicians. The sex workers discuss such issues as violence and safety, health and risk, politics and policy, media influence, and public perception of the trade, portraying the best and the worst facets of their working lives and expressing sentiments refreshingly at odds with commonly held opinions. Given recent Parliamentary recommendations to decriminalize prostitution, Sex Workers in the Maritimes Talk Back represents a timely shift to public discussions about sex work. Engaging and accessible, this book will be of interest to public policy practitioners, students of social and political science, community advocates, police, and sex workers and their families.

Did she choose that?’ Or, more normatively, ’Why would she choose that?’ This book critiques and offers an alternative to these questions, which have traditionally framed law and policy discussions circulating around controversial genderized practices. It examines the simplicity and incompleteness of choice-based rhetoric and of presumptions that women’s conduct is shaped, in an absolute way, either by choice or by coercion. This book develops an analytical framework that aims to discern the meaning and value that women may ascribe to morally ambiguous practices. An analysis of law’s approach to polygamy, surrogacy and sex work, particularly in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, provides a basis for evaluating the choice-coercion binary and for contemplating alternate modes for assessing, from a law and policy standpoint, the palatability of social practices that appear pernicious to women. Weaving together interdisciplinary research, an innovative analytical framework for assessing choices ostensibly harmful to women, and a critique of the legal rules governing such choices, this book bears relevance for students, scholars, practicing jurists and policymakers seeking a richer understanding of conduct that moves women to the margins of law and society.

Sex work continues to provoke controversial legal and public policy debates world-wide that raise fundamental questions about the state’s role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. This book unites ethnographic research from China, Canada, and the United States to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of negative consequences for sex workers’ health, safety, and human rights. Such consequences are enabled through the operations of an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Criminalized sex workers report police harassment, seizure of condoms, and adversarial police-sex worker relations that enable others to abuse them with impunity. Chapter Three describes how sex workers negotiate these restrictions on their rights and personal autonomy via their arrest avoidance and client management strategies, self-treatment of health issues, selective mutual aid, rights-based organizing, and entrenchment in sex work or other criminalized activities. Chapter Four describes how researchers working in countries or locales that criminalize sex work face ethical concerns as well as barriers to their work at the practical, institutional, and political levels.

“Our voices scrubbed out and forgotten. There are those who research and write about sex workers who often forget we are human.” —Amy Lebovitch Shawna Ferris gives a voice to sex workers who are often pushed to the background, even by those who fight for them. In the name of urban safety and orderliness, street sex workers face stigma, racism, and ignorance. Their human rights are ignored, and some even lose their lives. Ferris aims to reveal the cultural dimensions of this discrimination through literary and art-critical theory, legal and sociological research, and activist intervention. Canadian cities are striving for high safety ratings by eliminating crime, which includes “cleaning” urban areas of the street sex industry. Ironically, sex workers also want to live and work in a safe environment. Ferris questions these sanitizing political agendas, reviews exclusionary legislative and police initiatives, and examines media representations of sex workers. This book has much to offer to educators and activists, sex workers and anti-violence organizations, and academics studying women, cultural, gender, or indigenous issues.

Globally, discussions about sex work focus on exploitation. The media regularly provides us with stories about teen girls coerced to perform sexual acts for money, frequently beaten and robbed by their pimps or traffickers. While one would have to be hard-pressed to deny that sex workers are victimized, the popular media and our political leaders emphasize sex work as exclusively exploitative. In Negotiating Sex Work, Carisa R. Showden and Samantha Majic present a series of essays that depict sex work as an issue far more complex than generally perceived. Positions on sex work are primarily divided between those who consider that selling sexual acts is legitimate work and those who consider it a form of exploitation. Organized into three parts, Negotiating Sex Work rejects this either/or framework and offers instead diverse and compelling contributions that aim to reframe these viewpoints. Part I addresses how knowledge about sex work and sex workers is generated. The next section explores how nations and political actors who claim to protect individuals in sex work often further marginalize them. Finally, part III examines sex workers’ own political-organizational efforts to combat laws and policies that deem them deviant, sinful, or total victims. A timely and necessary intervention into sex work debates, this volume challenges how policy makers and the broader public regard sex workers’ capacity to advocate for their own interests. Contributors: Cheryl Auger; Sarah Beer, Dawson College, Montreal; Michele Tracy Berger, U of North Carolina–Chapel Hill; Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Raven Bowen; Gregg Bucken-Knapp, U of Gothenburg, Sweden; Ana Paula da Silva, Federal U of Viçosa; Valerie Feldman; Gregor Gall, U of Bradford; Kathleen Guidroz, Georgetown U; Annie Hill, U of Minnesota; Johan Karlsson Schaffer, U of Oslo; Edith Kinney, Mills College; Yasmin Lalani; Pia Levin; Alexandra Lutnick; Tamara O’Doherty, U of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia; Joyce Outshoorn, U of Leiden; Francine Tremblay, Concordia U, Montreal.

In the early twentieth century, abolitionists sought to stamp out sex work by penalizing all involved. In the generation that followed, neo-abolitionists looked at the sex industry from a feminist perspective, claiming that workers were victims caught in a patriarchal matrix. Yet both agreed that the industry was a destructive and corrupting force that should be eliminated. In this radical volume, five academics and activists convey their vision of prostitution as work, reclaiming the place of sex workers in the discussion of their lives and their work, and opposing discourses that position them as merely victims without agency.