scholarly journals Migration and Sex Work through a Gender Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-524
Author(s):  
Charlotte Valadier
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Sexual Trafficking

Abstract The trajectories of migration and prostitution are embedded in representations of body, gender, sex and sexuality. This article seeks to understand the articulation between migration and sex work through the lens of gender. To this end, this article relies on a typological approach that aims to clear some ground in the ongoing debate on the issues of prostitution, sex trafficking and migration of sex workers. It explores the theoretical cross-contribution as well as the conceptual limitations of radical, liberal, post-colonial, critical and postmodern feminist perspectives on the issues of prostitution, sex workers’ mobility and sex trafficking. It gives special focus to the contributions of the postmodern feminist reading, especially by highlighting how it has challenged conventional feminist theories, hitherto grounded in dualistic structures. In fact, the postmodern feminist approach makes a stand against the simplistic dichotomies such as First/Third World, passivity/agency, vulnerability/empowerment, innocence/conscience, sexual trafficking/voluntary prostitution or ‘trafficked victim’/‘autonomous sex worker.’ As such, postmodern feminism disrupts all fixed demarcations and homogeneous forms of categorisation on which the dominant feminist theories were based, allowing thus for the emergence of new practices of subjectivity as well as new forms of flexible identities.

scholarly journals The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: COVID-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Elene Lam ◽  
Elena Shih ◽  
Katherine Chin ◽  
Kate Zen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
The State ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
Sexual Services

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.

scholarly journals BEYOND THE MARKED WOMAN: THE NEW SEX WORKER IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, 2006-2016

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Kirshner
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Feminist Media Studies ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Care Worker

This dissertation argues that between 2006 and 2016, in a context of rising tolerance for sex workers, economic shifts under neoliberal capitalism, and the normalization of transactional intimate labour, popular culture began to offer new and humanizing images of the sex worker as an entrepreneur and care worker. This new popular culture legitimatizes sex workers in a growing services industry and carries important de-stigmatizing messages about sex workers, who continue to be among the most stigmatized of women workers in the U.S. These new representations challenge stereotypical portrayals of sex workers – as immoral criminals or exploited victims – that support conservative and patriarchal ideologies. Drawing upon feminist theories of sex work, labour theory, and feminist media studies methodology for exploring the nexus of gender, sexuality, and popular culture, this dissertation examines feature films, TV series, and TV and online documentaries that depict five sex work occupations – erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, and sex surrogates – to illustrate the new figure of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker under neoliberal capitalism. By emphasizing sex workers’ agency to choose their work, dignifying their skills, underscoring sex work as a means of economic mobility, and highlighting the positive contributions sex workers make to their clients’ lives, these popular culture representations challenge the anti-sex work position espoused by conservative patriarchal ideology and prohibitionist feminists. Some of these new representations, however, intertwine with a neoliberal post-feminist sensibility that frames empowerment as realizable through individualism and the market alone, rather than in collective ways, and pose few concrete solutions to the challenges faced by sex workers today, namely criminalization. Even so, this dissertation argues that these emerging twenty-first century representations of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker are progressive and mark a growing social tolerance for the idea that, for some women, sex work is legitimate work.

Fragments Towards an Impossible (Domestic) Genre of the Human in Kenyan Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Wairimũ Mũrĩithi
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
International Media ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Extrajudicial executions and other forms of police violence in Kenya have always been an issue of significant concern in local and international media and human rights organisations. Reflective of this, scholarly interest in crime fiction in Kenya has grown significantly in recent years. However, the gendered implications of criminality – from sex work to errant motherhood to alternative modes of investigation – are still largely overlooked in postcolonial literary fiction and criticism. As part of a larger study on how women writers and characters shape crime fiction in Kenya, this paper critically engages with stories that the criminalised woman knows, tells, forgets,  incarnates, discards or hides about the city. It does so by examining the history of urban sex workers in Kenya, the representation of ‘urban women’ in postcolonial Kenyan novels and contemporary mainstream media, and the various (post) colonial laws that criminalise sex work. Through Justina, an elusive character in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, I consider how (post)colonial legislative frameworks and social life attempt to manage “impossible domesticity” (Saidiya Hartman) inside and against the geo-history of gendered and classed criminality in urban Kenyan spaces. My purpose is to interrogate hegemonic constructions of the citizen – and by extension, of the human  – in Kenyan law and public morality Keywords: crime fiction, feminism, sex work, human, homo narrans

scholarly journals Complexities of Short-Term Mobility for Sex Work and Migration among Sex Workers: Violence and Sexual Risks, Barriers to Care, and Enhanced Social and Economic Opportunities

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 736-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira M. Goldenberg ◽  
Jill Chettiar ◽  
Paul Nguyen ◽  
Sabina Dobrer ◽  
Julio Montaner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Barriers To Care ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Sexual Risks ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
And Migration

Sex Tourism in Bahia

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Lorraine Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Socioeconomic Inequality ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Sex Tourism ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Brazilian Culture ◽  
Afro Brazilian

For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. The book explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness. The book argues that the cultural and sexual economies of tourism are inextricably linked in the Bahian capital city of Salvador. It shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers. The book combines historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural studies, and feminist perspectives to demonstrate how sexism, racism, and socioeconomic inequality interact in the context of tourism in Bahia.

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

2014 ◽  
Vol 653 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Marcus ◽  
Amber Horning ◽  
Ric Curtis ◽  
Jo Sanson ◽  
Efram Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Sex Trafficking ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Effective Policy ◽  
The Relationship

The dominant understanding in the United States of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” in which pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them. Such narratives of oppression typically depend on postarrest testimonials by former prostitutes and pimps in punishment and rescue institutions. In contrast, this article presents data collected from active pimps, underage prostitutes, and young adult sex workers to demonstrate the complexity of pimp-prostitute dyads and interrogate conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution. A holistic understanding of the factors that push minors into sex work and keep them there is needed to designand implement effective policy and services for this population.

scholarly journals The Finance of Sex Trafficking and Impact of COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-168
Author(s):  
Phoebe Ewen
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Money Laundering ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Sexual Slavery ◽  
Adults And Children

This paper examines how COVID-19 has impacted the lives of sex workers and how changing circumstances may make them and others even more vulnerable to exploitation into sex trafficking. It explores the perceptions and policies that keep sex workers from receiving the financial support needed to keep them safe at this time. It considers how sex work may be driven further underground, and the implications of this on the security of the workers involved. It also considers how the behaviour of clients may change as a result of the virus, examining the supply and demand drivers of online sexual exploitation of adults and children. This paper also outlines the fluidity of criminal nature, how criminals are adapting to changing circumstances and finding new ways to identify, groom, and exploit victims into sexual slavery. Finally, it analyses the implications that COVID-19 has had on the nature of money laundering and the related effects on the ability of financial institutions to operate as the ‘eyes and ears’ in the fight against global sex trafficking. It concludes with recommendations that can be made to financial institutions and related agencies, to respond rapidly to emerging risks and new trends in sexual exploitation and money laundering.

scholarly journals BEYOND THE MARKED WOMAN: THE NEW SEX WORKER IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, 2006-2016

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Kirshner
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Feminist Media Studies ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Care Worker

This dissertation argues that between 2006 and 2016, in a context of rising tolerance for sex workers, economic shifts under neoliberal capitalism, and the normalization of transactional intimate labour, popular culture began to offer new and humanizing images of the sex worker as an entrepreneur and care worker. This new popular culture legitimatizes sex workers in a growing services industry and carries important de-stigmatizing messages about sex workers, who continue to be among the most stigmatized of women workers in the U.S. These new representations challenge stereotypical portrayals of sex workers – as immoral criminals or exploited victims – that support conservative and patriarchal ideologies. Drawing upon feminist theories of sex work, labour theory, and feminist media studies methodology for exploring the nexus of gender, sexuality, and popular culture, this dissertation examines feature films, TV series, and TV and online documentaries that depict five sex work occupations – erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, and sex surrogates – to illustrate the new figure of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker under neoliberal capitalism. By emphasizing sex workers’ agency to choose their work, dignifying their skills, underscoring sex work as a means of economic mobility, and highlighting the positive contributions sex workers make to their clients’ lives, these popular culture representations challenge the anti-sex work position espoused by conservative patriarchal ideology and prohibitionist feminists. Some of these new representations, however, intertwine with a neoliberal post-feminist sensibility that frames empowerment as realizable through individualism and the market alone, rather than in collective ways, and pose few concrete solutions to the challenges faced by sex workers today, namely criminalization. Even so, this dissertation argues that these emerging twenty-first century representations of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker are progressive and mark a growing social tolerance for the idea that, for some women, sex work is legitimate work.

scholarly journals Justice and Civil Liberties on Sex Work in Contemporary International Human Rights Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Belinda Brooks-Gordon ◽  
Marjan Wijers ◽  
Alison Jobe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Adult Women ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Policy Problem ◽  
International Consultation ◽  
Forced Labour

To fulfil obligations in international law State parties have to take the issue of human trafficking seriously. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) provides General Recommendations (GR) to member states on the interpretation of the Women’s Convention. In 2018 the CEDAW Committee started to develop a GR on trafficking in women and girls in a process planned to conclude in 2020. The first stage towards this was through the publication of a Concept Note to serve as a basis for dialogue during the two-year international consultation period. The Concept Note is a vital link in a textual chain because it frames the policy problem and actively constructs its own ‘documentary reality’. This article provides a critical analysis of the CEDAW Concept Note on the grounds that such analysis provides an understanding of its discursive construction of trafficking, migrant labour and sex work, by an institution responsible for international jurisprudence on human rights. Analysis of the Concept Note explores the documentary constructions including narratives that merge adult women with girls, the symbolism of exploitation, the silencing of scientific research, the elision of sex worker voices, and sex work as work. The analysis leads us to conclude that the General Recommendation should define what counts as ‘exploitation’, and ‘forced labour’, and address the growing international recognition of best evidence on the wider impact of sex work laws, in order that legal framing and constructions of sex trafficking are not erroneously used to curtail rights of sex workers.

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