scholarly journals “New York is Dying”: Policing Outdoor Sex Workers in the Era of AIDS and Urban Renewal, 1981-88

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Helps
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Medical Studies ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Selling Sex

While the history of scapegoating sex workers in times of heightened moral anxiety is well-studied, work remains to be done on how the co-occurring crises of AIDS and “urban decline” in New York City inspired a renewed crackdown on street-based sex work. Though after 1978 New York State’s prostitution statute prohibited purchasing and selling sex, arrests continued to disproportionately affect women performing sex work, especially those based on the street. Three forces interacted to put “streetwalkers” at the centre of fears about the city’s moral and physical health. First, New Yorkers seized on an image of their city since the mid-1970s as a dangerous and vice-ridden metropolis to denigrate sex workers. Metaphors of disease—including the language used to describe AIDS—were readily deployed against sex work to “explain” New York’s state of sickness. Second, medical studies, which were decontextualized and disseminated in newspapers, posited sex workers as an epidemiological missing link between the gay and straight populations. Third, as part of a larger campaign to “clean up” blighted areas marked for “urban renewal,” the NYPD became increasingly aggressive towards outdoor sex workers. Sex workers met an array of popular assumptions about them by organizing conference meetings, educating each other on HIV/AIDS, and attempting to forge a counter-narrative to scapegoating. Their pursuit of self-representation was not always successful, but they used the resources available to them to mount moments of resistance and share strategies for survival within their ranks.

Demographic Change, Prostitution, and Sexually Transmitted Infection Rates in China

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avraham Ebenstein ◽  
Ethan J. Sharygin
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Transmitted Infection ◽  
Demand And Supply ◽  
Sexually Transmitted ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
History Of

China has experienced an explosion in the sex ratio at birth, with 25 million more men than women younger than 20 (2005 census). This chapter examines the implications of large numbers of men failing to marry on the supply-and-demand dynamics of sex work, with a focus on how this affects the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The chapter begins with a history of prostitution in China and describes the massive increase in sex work following economic reforms in the late 1970s. It then analyzes the current dynamics of demand and supply for sex work in China, using national census data and detailed microdata on sex workers. The authors find a clear link between high-population sex ratios, the prevalence of sex work, and STI rates. The analysis concludes with projections for the future and a discussion of policy responses in light of an anticipated increase in sex 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

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The conclusion surveys how in nineteenth-century Mexico, Europe, and regions around the world under European colonial rule, sex work took place in an environment of increasing government intervention, a phase in the history of sexuality that extends into the twenty-first century. The concern about disease control took on a more scientific, sanitary tone in the eighteenth century. This discourse remained critical to sex work law, as it does to the present day. Through prolific regulations, scientific studies, works of literature, and statements made by sex workers themselves, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an enormous increase in the archiving and inscribing of women who sold sex. But their roles remained the same: either pathetic victims (usually of non-whites or non-Christians or other feared populations), lascivious and scandalous disturbers of the peace, or dehumanized and horrific threats to public health. Imperialism and international conceptions of race/gender difference led to increasing government regulation in locations as dispersed as the disappearing Spanish American viceroyalties, extending outwards to Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

Selling Sex, Saving the Family

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Father Figures ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
Home Based ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Selling Sex

This chapter presents a controversial issue within the history of sexuality. It documents several case studies of sex work done within home-based brothels, where mothers, sisters, and father figures procured younger women and children. These examples would be interpreted today as sexual abuse, given that they involved girls under the age of sixteen, forced or manipulated into prostitution by more powerful individuals. The chapter tries to contextualize these cases within the contemporary domestic economy and culture of family life during the struggle for Mexican independence from Spain.Young women in fact betrayed filial loyalty and domestic hierarchies when they spoke as plaintiffs to denounce their sisters, mothers, or fathers for involving them in selling sex.In response to the complaints (the daughters’ disobedience to their familial superiors), the late viceregal state exercised paternalism as it stepped in to preserve traditional ideas of family as a sexual sanctuary for protected daughters.

Inventing “Little Italy”

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna R. Gabaccia
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Dime Novels ◽  
Police Reporting ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
The Moment ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Little Italy

Digitized texts open new methodologies for explorations of the history of ideas. This paper locates the invention of the term “Little Italy” in New York in the 1880s and explores its rapid spread through print and popular culture from police reporting to fictional portraits of slumming and then into adolescent dime novels and early film representations. New Yorkers invented “Little Italy” but they long disagreed with urban tourists about its exact location. Still, from the moment of its origin, both visitors and natives of New York associated Little Italy with entertainment, spectacle, and the search for “safe danger.” While the location of Little Italy changed over time, such associations with pleasure and crime have persisted, even as the neighborhood emptied of its immigrant residents.

Hidden in the Light: Occupational Norms among Crack-Using Street-Level Sex Workers

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Maher
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
York City ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Crack Users

This article explores the “hypersexuality” hypothesis and, in particular, the phenomenon of sex-for-crack exchanges, by drawing on recent ethnographic research with women crack users engaged in street-level sex work in New York City. Viewing sex work as work, the study identifies the existence of a hitherto hidden set of occupational norms which cohere around the concept of discrimination as a central organizing principle in street-level prostitution. The article describes the ways in which established norms in relation to price, sex acts, clients, and bartering practices govern commercial sex transactions at the street level and examines their effects in regulating both individual and collective conduct. The analysis draws attention to the deficits of previous research and, specifically, the absence of context and the lack of attention to shared cultural practices and occupational norms which have made possible the erasure of agency from representations of these women's lives.

In Pursuit of Privilege

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Elite ◽  
Service Sectors ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Economic Foundations

A history that extends from the 1750s to the present, In Pursuit of Privilege recounts upper-class New Yorkers’ struggle to create a distinct world guarded against outsiders, even as economic growth and democratic opportunity enabled aspirants to gain entrance. Despite their efforts, New York City’s upper class has been drawn into the larger story of the city both through class conflict and through their role in building New York’s cultural and economic foundations. In Pursuit of Privilege describes the famous and infamous characters and events at the center of this extraordinary history, from the elite families and wealthy tycoons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the Wall Street executives of today. From the start, upper-class New Yorkers have been open and aggressive in their behavior, keen on attaining prestige, power, and wealth. Clifton Hood sharpens this characterization by merging a history of the New York economy in the eighteenth century with the story of Wall Street’s emergence as an international financial center in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the dominance of New York’s financial and service sectors in the 1980s. Bringing together several decades of upheaval and change, he shows that New York’s upper class did not rise exclusively from the Gilded Age but rather from a relentless pursuit of privilege, affecting not just the urban elite but the city’s entire cultural, economic, and political fabric.

Introduction: The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Taking a policy perspective

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Hammond ◽  
Feona Attwood
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Study ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Policy Perspective ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Sexual Commerce ◽  
Selling Sex

The transformation of the sex industry since 2000 has meant that the image of the ‘street prostitute’ touting for business on dark street corners is less representative of sex work or sex workers than it has ever been. Much of our knowledge about the sex industry, and about wider transformations of economic, intimate and cultural life, is out of date (Bernstein, 2007a), and policy processes are taking place within the context of limited or outdated knowledge. The growth in visibility, consumption and diversity of sexual commerce is now well recognised (Weitzer, 2000; Agustín, 2005; Scoular and Sanders, 2010) and commercial sex industries are known to operate across a variety of locations, and within specific modes of production and consumption, which are historically, contextually and culturally contingent and where ‘the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same’ (Agustín, 2005: 619).

scholarly journals Identifying Risk Factors and Spatial Clustering of HIV Infection Among Female Sex Workers in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Elangovan Arumugam ◽  
Vasna Joshua ◽  
Santhakumar Aridoss ◽  
Ganesh Balasubramanian ◽  
Nagaraj Jaganathasamy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Hiv Infection ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Component Analysis ◽  
Index Score ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Selling Sex

Background: The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic in India is generally considered to be more concentrated, with the focus on high-risk groups including female sex workers (FSWs). The Integrated Biological and Behavioral Surveillance (IBBS), the first nationwide surveillance conducted during 2014-2015, collected many key indicators, including indicators related to HIV/STI transmission. The purpose of this study was to develop an index score for each domain surveyed and to identify focus areas for interventions among FSWs. Methods: The study population consisted of 27,007 FSWs. Forty high-risk related covariates of HIV/STI transmission, demographic characteristics, sexual history, condom practices, knowledge of HIV/STI and biological variables were considered. The original data set was examined using the correlation matrix and was reduced to 15 highly-correlated factors using principal component analysis. The factors were further improved using varimax rotation and the percentage of variation was used as weights to obtain the initial score for each domain, which were then standardized for comparison. Bartlett’s test of sphericity was examined before the factor extraction. Results: Six factors were extracted, which together explained about 73% of the total variation. The factors were: (1) more number of clients; (2) younger FSW and started selling sex at younger age; (3) experiencing condom breakage; (4) having occasional clients and poor HIV/AIDS knowledge; (5) illiteracy; and (6) a longer period of sex work. Six domains with an index score of above 80, from the states of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand need greater intervention. Conclusion and Implications for Translation: FSWs’ current age, age at commencement of sex work, and the number of clients were the indicators most-associated with HIV infection. Therefore, program and policy interventions should focus on FSWs who are younger than <25 years, who started selling sex at <22 years, and who have >10 clients. Key words: • Female Sex Worker • Kriged Map • Factor Analysis • Principle Component Analysis • HIV • Sexually Transmitted Infections   Copyright © 2021 Elangovan et al. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in this journal, is properly cited.

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