Sex Workers

“Carnivalesque” is perhaps the best, if not the only way to describe what was going on at the Bab al-Saghir Cemetery that hot summer afternoon in 2008.  In front of the graves of the Prophet’s wives, Shi‘i pilgrims could buy Viagra, sex-enhancement creams, and massage oils.  Sexual mores were normally strictly guarded in Syria and medicines were usually available only at pharmacies.  Yet, there in one of the most historically and religiously significant cemeteries in Damascus, makeshift vendors sold an array of sex-related items.  In order to analyze this phenomenon, this article draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque.”  First, it provides a short background of Twelver Shi‘ism in Syria and explains how Shi‘i religious tourism encouraged the development of black markets.  Then, it examines how Shi‘i pilgrimage, which occurred all year around, but peaked during Muharram, fostered an attitude that liberated Shi‘is from prevalent social norms and emphasized “grotesque” imagery and practices, including blood, death, and sex.  In short, it follows Michael Taussig’s call for anthropologists to attend to the transgressive aspects of religious ritual.

In recent years, Ireland has seen the emergence of a well-organised campaign to introduce legislation that criminalises the purchase, but not the sale, of sexual services. While a domestic consensus has seemingly formed in favour of client criminalisation, global health and human rights bodies have increasingly taken a contrary position: that neither party to a commercial sex transaction should be criminalised, at least where the parties are adults and the exchange takes place on a voluntary basis.

This paper sets out the international legal basis for this alternative consensus among actors in the international health and human rights sectors. It argues against client criminalisation from a human rights perspective, focusing on sex workers' right to health. After a brief introduction to the right to health in international law, it sets out various elements of the right to health that are implicated in the proposal to criminalise sex workers' clients. Using examples from research in countries that penalise the purchase of sex - directly or indirectly - it shows how these laws may jeopardise the health of sex workers in a number of ways, impairing their right to health under international law. It considers and rebuts the argument that client criminalisation actually promotes the right to health, showing this to rest on unsupportable ideological assumptions and flawed interpretations of human rights law. Finally, it briefly examines an alternative model - that of New Zealand, in which neither sex workers nor their clients are criminalised, and sex work is treated as a form of labour.

Studies of male sex workers are often confined to the individual level rather than exploring their work environment per se or the larger ecological context in which their business activities are embedded. We know relatively little, for example, about the spatial location of erotic worksites (apart from street-level work) or the interactional dynamics of sellers and clients within such settings. This article presents an ethnographic study of bars and clubs in Prague and Berlin where male sexual commerce is transacted. We find important differences between the cities in the social organization of the bars and in participants' demographic characteristics. The analysis links our micro-level findings to the larger forces of labour migration and sex tourism, factors that differ between the two cases.

Este documento desarrolla una mirada innovadora a la prevención del VIH/SIDA hace parte de una colección que pretendió dar una mirada diferencial a la ocurrencia de la epidemia, basándose en una perspectiva de derechos que entidiende que la vulneración de éstos es un factor preponderante en el desarrollo de la epidemia.

Taking a feminist cultural criminological analysis to the regulation of sex work in the United Kingdom, this paper argues against the dominant deviancy and the increasingly abolitionist criminal justice model for regulating sex work. The paper begins by offering a critique of the dominant regulatory regimes which have operated since the Victorian era, amended in part in the 1950s with Wolfenden, and currently being reinscribed with the Home Office strategy on prostitution and various pieces of legislation. The focus is specifically upon research with female sex workers and the usefulness of using Participatory Action research methodologies (PAR) with sex workers, agencies, and policy makers in order to foreground the diverse voices and experiences of sex workers, challenge the current focus on abolitionist criminal justice regimes and outcomes, and offer an alternative framework for a cultural materialist analysis of sex work, drawing upon the work of Nancy Fraser.

Growing public health attention has been placed on the HIV vulnerability of males who sell sex to males in India. However, there is little research that outlines the trajectories through which males come to be involved in practicing sex work in India. Locating “male sex work” within a vibrant social, political, and erotic landscape, this article explores the intertwining of “sexual subjectivity” and “sex work.” The authors refer to 70 sexual life histories generated from research conducted in Mysore to unsettle dominant public health notions that regard male sex work as rooted solely in poverty or as a decontexualized “behavioral risk factor.” Such perspectives are countered by demonstrating how male sex work in Mysore encompasses a complex interplay between self-realization, sexual desire, social interaction, and public health discourse. Local conceptualizations of selfhood are discussed to suggest the limitations of prevailing empowerment discourses that advance Western notions of individuality.

In 2003 New Zealand passed the Prostitution Reform Act, decriminalising sex work and associated activities. This thesis examines news media representations of sex work and workers from 2010 to 2016 to determine how these texts construct sex work in a postdecriminalisation environment. The key questions this thesis considers are: which sex workers are presented by journalists as acceptable, and what conditions are attached to that acceptability? Using media studies frameworks to analyse the texts, this thesis demonstrates that in a decrimininalised environment the media plays a regulatory role, with the power to dictate what modes of sex work are acceptable largely shifting away from the courts. In the absence of a debate about the il/legality of sex work, a different kind of binaristic construction emerges, frequently related to public visibility or invisibility. 

This thesis uses discourse analysis techniques to examine texts relating to three key media events: the repeated attempts legally restrict where street sex workers could work in South Auckland, texts about migrant sex workers around the time of the Rugby World Cup, and texts about independent or agency-based sex workers. My methodology involved examining the texts to establish who was situated as an expert through discourse representation, what words were used to describe sex workers and their jobs, and then discerning what narratives recurred in the texts about each event.

My analysis indicates that in a decriminalised environment news media representations of sex work afford acceptability to those who are less affected by structural oppressions: predominantly young, white, cisgendered, middle or upper-class women who see few clients and work indoors. However, for workers who fall outside these bounds news reports continue to reproduce existing sex work stigma. I highlight how racism and transmisogyny frequently play into news representations of sex work, even under a framework of decriminalisation, in ways that serve to avoid acknowledging the work of (some) sex workers as legitimate labour, and how transmisogyny is used in attempts to exert and justify bodily control over sex workers. By considering how these representations function to undermine the legitimacy of the work, this thesis demonstrates the ways news media functions as a site at which stigma about sex work is produced, reinforced, or validated for a non-sex working audience.

Additionally, this thesis argues that the ways acceptable sex work is produced are predicated on agency and independent workers’ performance of choice and enjoyment, requiring the actual labour involved in sex work to be obscured or minimised. This obfuscation of the “work” of sex work makes it more difficult to advocate for improved employment rights and conditions, which is heightened due to the advertorial function of some news media texts. Furthermore, the ways in which sex workers’ narratives are constructed is also indicative of which workers are or are not acceptable: only certain workers are permitted to speak for themselves, and frequently only when their accounts are supported by other, non-sex working, voices.

This thesis therefore concludes that while news media represents some limited forms of sex work as acceptable, the ways in which this is discursively achieved restrict the ability of workers to self-advocate. Furthermore, even workers represented as acceptable are in a precarious position, with this acceptability being mediated by their ability or willingness to adhere to specific, heteronormatively mediated, identity categories, and to inhabit a specific enthusiasm in their voiced feelings about their work.

This paper analyses barriers to consistent condom use in the context of transactional sex among female sex workers in mainland China. It reveals how differences in socioeconomic profile and organisational hierarchies amongst different groups of sex workers create different barriers to condom use. Data was collected by means of field observation of entertainment venues and in-depth interviews. Findings suggest that, compared with other sex workers, street-walkers are less likely to use condoms with their clients, hold highly disadvantaged socioeconomic profiles and work in isolation. Major barriers to condom use link to economic deprivation and threats of violence from clients. For the women working in entertainment venues, drunkenness of clients, pricing mechanisms and familiarity with clients pose barriers to condom use. Yet within all these constraints women are not powerless and instead find ways to exercise agency and gain personal protection and economic advantage. In the newly emerging China, both structural hierarchies of work and individual agency inform condom use by female sex workers. Future HIV intervention programmes need to take these factors into account in order to meet the needs of different groups of women sex workers.

Siegmann argues that as the ILO celebrates its centenary this year, ‘the international organisation for labour rights protection has yet to come out as an advocate for decent work for sex workers.’ This means that the organisation will have to change its perspective of seeing ‘sex work as an occupation that it considers harmful for children as well as involving a high risk of forced labour and HIV infection.’ For Siegmann, the ILO has to engage the various struggles by sex workers and activists who have demanded recognition of sex work as work, labour rights equal to workers in other industries, freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

This paper focuses on VPHIV at the level of sex workers in Côte d'Ivoire, particularly in the communes of Marcory and San Pedro. Despite the policies implemented at the international and national level in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the rate of transmission is increasing. So, how does the health care offered to people living with HIV influence the quality of the life of ARV sex workers? To answer this question, the qualitative approach was employed in this study. It was conducted with a sample of 25 sex workers recruited using network or snowball sampling. With this target group of 8 men and 17 women ranging in age from 10-13 to 27 years and over, in-depth interviews were conducted. Also, 05 representatives of the expert population were interviewed. It appears that the social representations of ARVs explain the non-observance of the treatment. Also, therapeutic routes, the social environment, and economic difficulties have a significant positive influence on the physical and psychological health of people living with HIV. Consequently, the side effects of the drug were pointed out. The stigmatization makes them self-victimized, which moves them away from antiretroviral therapy. Nevertheless, a radiography of the health system in this area, including medical devices, should be reviewed to better address the care of these patients.

This paper is thus organized in four substantive sections: Transcript Text Analysis, Interpretive Analysis of the Hearing Process, Presentation and Analysis of Qualitative Survey Results, and Kerry’s Personal Reflections. Briefly, our analysis reveals significant levels of partisanship during the hearings, especially on the part of Conservative Party committee members, and the use of ideology rather than evidence by witnesses supporting the bill. Our analysis also reveals that witnesses against the bill felt disrespected and marginalized during the hearings, and our qualitative and quantitative evidence confirms their experiences. We conclude the paper with recommendations for the sex worker rights community’s next steps toward law reform in Canada.

El trabajo sexual se articula como un medio de supervivencia para muchas mujeres, la mayoría procedentes de los dos tercios del mundo-utilizando un término de Mohanty-, pese a su desarrollo en condiciones realmente denigrantes. Igualmente sabemos que no se trata de un trabajo cualquiera, sino que se trata una actividad estigmatizada debido a la configuración hegemónica y normativa de la sexualidad femenina, esto es, del deber ser de las mujeres como mujeres. Entre otras cosas, tal injuria prepara al sujeto en cuestión para la deshumanización, ergo para la violencia de género. En adelante, abordaremos la forma en que la construcción estigmatizante de las trabajadoras del sexo como “víctimas”, “mujeres caídas”, o “delincuentes”, supone un obstáculo tanto en la lucha contra la violencia sexista como para que puedan gozar de una vida que merezca la pena ser vivida.

Female sex workers (FSWs) are vulnerable to violence within and beyond the workplace. Violence is associated with increased burden of HIV, possibly explained through physiologic or behavioral causal pathways. These analyses sought to determine the relationship between lifetime sexual violence with unprotected, condomless vaginal intercourse (UVI) among FSWs in West Africa. FSWs (aged ≥18 years) were recruited into a cross-sectional study through respondent-driven sampling in two West African countries, Togo and Burkina Faso. A total of 1380 participants were enrolled from January to July 2013, and completed a sociobehavioral questionnaire and HIV testing. Measures included sex work history, lifetime experiences of violence victimization, sexual practices, and UVI (past month). Crude and adjusted robust log binomial regression was conducted to estimate prevalence ratios (PrR) as a measure of association between UVI with clients and the primary exposure, forced sex. Self-reported life...

The variable “gender” rarely appearsin prostitution research. Its inclusion raises the samequestions brought up with respect to other areas ofwork: Is there a gendered perspective with respect tothe work and are gender inequalities reflected init? This study examines gender differences in the workof 140 sex workers in the San Francisco Tenderloin. Aswell as women and men who are workers, we include transgender workers (genetic males who presentthemselves as women), further accentuating differencesby gender. Looking at work-specific characteristics, wefind that women do not suffer inequities of income. They are, however, more prone tooccupational hazards. Transgenders, who suffer the mostsocietal discrimination, are closer to women than men intheir work situation. Examining the sexuality of sex workers, the women are the least likely toenjoy sex with clients. Men report more sexual enjoymentwith clients and transgenders are closer to the men inthis regard. Few differences are, however, found in sexual pleasure in the personal livesof the women, men, and transgenders. A gender differencethat stands out is that the men have more noncommercialsex partners than the women. Again, transgenders are more like the men, although various aspectsof their condition make for some uniquedifferences.

This article offers a personal reflection of my journey into participatory
arts-based research with sex work migrants in South Africa. It begins by sharing some background information of how my own experience as a migrant woman, and my layered (sometimes conflicted) identities, have continued to shape and influence much of my scholarly work, including my commitment to engaging in research that supports (or at least tries to support) social justice. Through this article, I offer an example of how the ‘personal is political’ is entwined in feminist values of research and engagement. Those who experience the issues under investigation must be considered equal partners in research processes. Collaborative forms of knowledge production can support social justice, particularly if efforts strive to shift the centre from which knowledge is traditionally generated and disseminated.