scholarly journals Sex Work and the City

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-13
Author(s):  
Helen Roitberg
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Sexual Services ◽  
The City ◽  
Ongoing Project

Bill C-36, or the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, which was introduced in Canada in 2014, made the purchase of sexual services illegal. To the end of eliminating sex work, Bill C-36 rests on the premise that sex work is inherently exploitative, and that sex workers and their communities are harmed by the exchange of sexual services. Considering that Indigenous women are overrepresented among sex workers and disproportionately victims of severe violence, this paper examines the goals of Bill C-36 in conversation with Canada’s ongoing project of colonialism. This paper demonstrates that Bill C-36 upholds the systemic devaluation of Indigeneity by which Indigenous women’s bodies are rendered deserving of violence, and by which this violence is normalized and invisibilized. Rather than protect ‘victims’ of sexual exploitation, Bill C-36 relies on the colonial stereotypes of the Indigenous prostitute to reimagine sexually autonomous Indigenous women as inherent threats to (white) Canadian society and themselves, and thereby justify state regulation in both public and private spaces.

scholarly journals Pussy Power: A Contemporaneous View of Indigenous Women and Their Role in Sex Work

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Corrinne T. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
Sexual Services

Sex work is the trade of sexual services in exchange for money or other goods of value. In the context of Indigenous Australia, sex work often produces narratives of victimisation and oppression reinforcing the patriarchal power and colonial dominance that is rife in Australia over Indigenous women’s bodies and behaviours. Drawing from interviews with Indigenous women who are engaged with sex work, this paper challenges these narratives by examining the motivation and meanings that shape Indigenous women’s decisions to undertake sex work, offering a compelling counter-narrative that discusses how Indigenous women seek and enact agency, sexuality, and sovereignty through the pussy power of sex work.

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.

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

Political Economy of Embodiment: Capitalizing on Globally Staged Bodies in Nigerian Beauty Pageants and Vietnamese Sex Work

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (6) ◽  
pp. 953-972 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oluwakemi M. Balogun ◽  
Kimberly Kay Hoang
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
General Public ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Beauty Pageants ◽  
Select Group

How do various stakeholders capitalize off of display workers’ bodies? This article uses a comparative-case approach to examine two different sites—beauty pageants in Nigeria and high-end sex workers in Vietnam—where women’s bodies are differentially staged with varying degrees of visibility. Theoretically, this article develops the concept of political economy of embodiment to account for a network of people onstage, backstage, and offstage who capitalize off displayed bodies in qualitatively different ways. Beauty pageants in Nigeria take place on highly visible national and global stages. Contestants’ bodies signal African beauty as being fashion-forward, which propels and integrates Nigeria into international arenas of diplomacy and trade. High-end sex workers in Vietnam work on a stage that is hidden from the general public yet open for a select group of Vietnam’s elites. Sex workers’ bodies are on display to project an ideal of Asian ascendancy in Vietnam’s market.

Imagining Spaces of Violence and Transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
Lizzie Seal ◽  
Maggie O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
History Of ◽  
Valentine's Day ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses specifically on the issue of space, place, violence and transgression drawing on case studies in Canada and Northern Ireland. ‘Imagining spaces of violence and transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland’ focuses first of all on the lives of indigenous women and sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). For 26 years, on 14 February, Valentine’s Day, women of the DTES have led a memorial march through the city, stopping at the places and spaces where women were murdered or went missing. The chapter draws on material from walking methods, participatory photographs and interviews with women who attended the march in 2016 to examine spaces of past, present and future in their lives. Continuing the theme of the construction and impact of space and borders explored in the previous chapter, this chapter also examines the history of the ‘peace walls’, ‘peace lines’ or ‘border lines’ in Belfast in the context of spaces of war, violence and conflict in Northern Ireland. Specifically,the ‘architecture of conflict’ is explored through criminological scholarship on the conflict in Northern Ireland. As with the Vancouver case study, arts-based walking methods are utilised that explore these border spaces through sensory, kinaesthetic, multi-modal research with citizens of Belfast.

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 The Quandary of Thai Women Prostitutes: Contemporary Situations of Poor and Working Class Thai Women Sex Workers in Thailand and New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Piamsuk Menasveta
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Primary Methods ◽  
Thai Women

<p>As a Thai feminist scholar, I engaged in a study of the economic and social circumstances of a particular group of women, poor and working class Thai sex workers, over the late 1990s to 2001. In this thesis, Thailand and New Zealand are the primary geographical points for the commercialisation of poor and working class Thai women prostitutes. The rational is to present an explanation for why these women engaged both in the Thailand and New Zealand sex trade. In addition, my thesis investigates the causes and consequences of Thai women being traded nationally and globally, as though they were a form of merchandise. The chief assumption underlying this study is that the effects of female poverty, such as the deficiency and inadequacy of education and of work opportunities, influence the numbers of poor and working-class Thai girls and women entering the sex industry. These women are additionally constrained socially by their gender, their poverty and their class position combined. Inequality between males and females in Thai culture is the overriding factor contributing to unjust profiteering by the sex businesses that employ these women sex workers. The causes and consequences of sex work among poor and working class Thai women are investigated by interviewing thirty former and current prostitutes in Thailand and in New Zealand. The hypothesis that their plight is mainly a result of sex discrimination in Thai society is examined by using Thai feminist methodologies. The interviews show that these sex workers initially entered prostitution in order to escape from poverty, and continued to do sex work because of particular controlling factors in their lives such as the obligation to support their families/children. The interviews also implied the misleading belief of Thai women sex workers that sex work would bring them economic security. However, as the findings show, sex work does not always engender such financial security, but frequently begets painful experiences. In spite of this, most prostitutes assent to this situation and prolong their sex occupation. Later, these Thai prostitutes struggle and hope for self-sufficient improvement of their lives in first world regions and countries other than Thailand. The difficulty of avoiding sexual exploitation in Thailand pressurised them into migrating to other countries, including New Zealand. In general, the findings of my research establish that Thai women prostitutes have little control over their economic state in overseas countries. However they had less power over their lives in Thailand and elsewhere than in they had in New Zealand. In addition, gambling and alcohol seem to be used as the primary methods of comforting their personal stress. The negligence of their money discipline is also the cause of Thai sex workers intermittently re-entered prostitution. In particular, the stigma of sex work is an outstanding aspect in their later lives after giving up sex work. I conclude that sex work is a destructive work alternative for most Thai sex workers, though it obviously offers the possibility of making some money. Furthermore, I assert that their individual rights must be upheld as equivalent to those of other women, so that these sex workers are empowered in their 'life situation'.</p>

Female sex work in Yangon, Myanmar

Sexual Health ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Talikowski ◽  
Sue Gillieatt
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Political Support ◽  
People Living With Hiv ◽  
Sex Trade ◽  
Sexually Transmitted ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
The Government

Background: Myanmar (Burma), with an upper estimate of 400 000 people living with HIV/AIDS, faces a dangerous and potentially devastating epidemic. Female sex workers in the country are one of the most affected populations, with high prevalence rates of both HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Methods: A qualitative study was undertaken in Yangon at the end of 2002 to investigate the social and demographic features contributing to the transmission of HIV among female sex workers in urban Myanmar. Twenty-seven key informants from the government, non-government organisations (NGOs), international non-government organisations (INGOs), private sector and the United Nations system agencies and 25 women currently working in the sex trade were interviewed. Results: The sex trade in Yangon is rapidly growing and is characterised by a high degree of complexity. The number of female sex workers is estimated to be between 5000 and 10 000 and there are ~100 brothels operating in various townships around the city. Nearly one-third of the women in the study reported previous imprisonment for offences related to sex work as well as fear of harassment, sexual exploitation, violence and gang rape. Almost half reported using condoms with clients at all times. Contradicting views exist as to the level of awareness about STIs and HIV among Yangon sex workers, with the majority never having been tested for HIV. Only one-quarter of women were regular patients of the limited number of STI clinics operated by INGOs. Conclusions: Female sex workers in Myanmar remain a highly marginalised group almost inaccessible due to a variety of legal, political, cultural and social factors and are particularly vulnerable to HIV and STIs. It is important to encourage partnerships between INGOs by promoting service coordination and information sharing to increase the availability of services for sex workers and to build political support for an unpopular cause.

“I Have My Own Room on 139th Street”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Sexual Labor ◽  
Sexual Services

This chapter explores black women's multilayered roles within New York's sex commerce, moving beyond widely accepted historical interpretations that position black sex laborers primarily as street solicitors. Identifying black women as madam-prostitutes, casual prostitutes, and sex-house proprietors and entrepreneurs, this chapter addresses the difficulties of documenting sex work within black communities, the broad socioeconomic conditions and personal circumstances outlining black women's entrance into the urban sexual economy, and the occupational benefits of indoor prostitution. In an attempt to avoid or limit their presence on New York streets, black sex workers—when the opportunity arose—sold and performed sexual services in furnished rooms and hotels, in their own homes, in massage parlors and nightclubs, and in other legitimate and illegitimate commercial businesses. Furthermore, indoor and residential sexual labor was significant to sex laborers' working and personal lives.

scholarly journals The Perfect Victim: ‘Young girls’, domestic trafficking, and anti-prostitution politics in Canada

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-149
Author(s):  
Elya Durisin ◽  
Emily Van der Meulen
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Adult Women ◽  
Exotic Dancers ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
Sexual Services ◽  
State Protection

This article explores debates among politicians in Ontario, Canada, regarding anti-trafficking legislation introduced in 2016 and 2017. We find that contemporary discussions in the political sphere have shifted away from concerns about the trafficking of migrant exotic dancers and toward the sexual exploitation of girls and young women, represented as idealised, inculpable victims. We suggest that this conflates the diverse experiences of girls and adult women, configures them all as child-like, and renders both groups as being in need of state protection. The new ‘perfect victim’ serves to legitimise policy approaches that criminalise sexual services, despite those laws being deemed harmful to sex workers in courts and other venues.

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