Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (review)

Around the world prostitutes, exotic dancers, and other sex laborers are organizing for their rights. They are fighting to keep their brothels open, challenging stigmas and stereotypes, and exposing corruption within the sex industry. Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, edited by Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, is a collection of essays that diagram some of the activities and issues surrounding the global sex workers’ movement and map out its possible future courses of action. This collection testifies to sex workers’ experiences and proposes a holistic approach and a realistic view of international sex workers rights. Most of the articles offer a liberal and seldom heard perspective on the issue, and all of them challenge stereotypes and stigmas associated with sex work.

From the start, by using the term “sex worker” in the book’s title and throughout the articles, the editors and contributors make clear their intent to move away from evaluating the morality of sex work to recognizing “prostitution” in all of its forms as a type of labor. In doing so, the authors expose some of the mis-conceptions surrounding sex work and encourage reevaluation of its meaning and the status of its participants. Global Sex Workers is broken down into four parts. Part One: Rethinking Sex Work, considers old and new legal, political, and societal definitions of sex work and their implications for the global sex workers’ movement. Part Two: Migrations and Tourism, explores the structural factors that underlie sex workers’ transnational movements as well as strategies that they have developed to control certain aspects of the sex industry. Part Three: Sex Workers’ Organizations, describes some of the organizations involved in the sex worker movement. Finally, Part Four: AIDS Prevention and Sex Workers’ Empowerment, explores some of the AIDS prevention projects in the industry. I will review certain articles that I believe exemplify each section’s overall purpose. From Part One, I will compare articles written by Jo Doezema and Jo Bindman, both of which examine definition and categorization in international sex labor discourse. From Part Two, I will discuss Heather Montgomery’s article on child prostitution and identity. From Part Three, I will introduce a couple of the current sex workers organizations. From Part Four, I will review the activities of the Synergy Women and Development (SYNFEV) program and its AIDS prevention project in Senegal.

Rethinking Sex Work

From nine to five, lawyers are sleazy, politicians are liars, and doctors are Good Samaritans. However, when they leave the office many assume roles as husbands or wives, mothers or fathers, and members of the community. Prostitutes, on the other hand, are viewed as whores, drug addicts, and victims no matter where they are or what they are doing. Sex work is not just one of a number of jobs a person may hold. Rather, it is a way of life—an identity that a person can never escape.

In her article, Forced to Choose: Beyond the Voluntary v. Forced Prostitution Dichotomy, Jo Doemeza takes a controversial look at the subject of categorization as it relates to how sex worker’s rights are approached by feminists and by the international community. Doemeza notes that the international discourse has shifted from primarily an abolitionist view of prostitution to one that distinguishes between free and forced prostitution. She reviews current approaches that focus on whether or not prostitution can be a choice. For example, she contrasts the views advanced by The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), which defines prostitution as a form of sexual exploitation, and the Global Reliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW), which advocates for the inclusion of a right to self-determination in anti-trafficking legislation.

Although Doemeza concedes the importance of the new discourse—which at least implicitly legitimizes prostitution as a choice—she persuasively argues that the distinction between forced and free prostitution is inappropriate and too simplistic to describe sex workers’ experiences. She adds that such a discourse may be as effective in denying...