Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision by Samantha Majic (review)

Against the well-established idea that social movement borne groups become less motivated and efficacious at fighting for radical change when they are funded by state institutions, Samantha Majic offers a refreshing case study of complex strategies deployed by sex workers' rights organizations to challenge practices and policies in Sex Work Politics: From Protests to Service Provision. Through extensive ethnographic work with California Prostitute Education Project (cal-pep) and St. James Infirmary in the San Francisco Bay area the mid-2000s, this manuscript documents the struggles and successes of these organizations at negotiating between funding mandates, 501c3 nonprofit laws, and their own political stances on decriminalization and human rights of sex workers within an often-hostile institutional environment.

Majic's precise use of vivid ethnographic descriptions, interview transcripts, and organizational documents weaves a thorough portrait of the subtle and important ways in which resistance to state control is achieved. The author takes a much-needed step back from conventional academic wisdom regarding the (im)possibilities for social change stemming from non-profits and instead reframes the question to look at the ways in which they are shaped and interact with their institutional environment.

The book centres on the work and struggles of cal-pep and St. James Infirmary, in many ways the institutionalized descendants of Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (coyote), the United States' first prostitutes' rights groups, and the collective within which the term "sex worker" was coined or at least brought to mainstream language. Both give direct services to the community they represent and are, on paper, textbook examples of non-profits who could surrender their radical commitment to militant work towards better working and legal conditions for sex workers in order to secure the money needed for organizational survival.

Majic argues and shows that there are ways for them "to retain or develop goals or features that engender oppositional stances or reactions." (26) They do this through what she calls resistance maintenance, a deliberate strategy of promoting politically contentious ideas that challenge state policy and pursue broader social-change goals within their organization as well as in wider social and political arenas. By carefully situating themselves as indispensable health and social service providers for the historically hard to reach community that are sex workers, they succeed in maintaining their opposition to dominant state policies and minimizing their co-optation. The fact that states, such as the United States, that enact criminalization and other forms of discrimination against sex workers are even less likely to be able to "reach" them certainly plays a part in creating a context in which the work of organizations like cal-pep and St. James Infirmary are indispensable.

Three properties of resistance maintenance are described and analysed to substantiate the main argument. The first to be addressed is oppositional implementation, which describes the ways in which activist organizations capitalize on certain trends in non-profit policy to develop missions and activities that enact radical political goals. These organizations carve out "habitats" (64) where organizers can meet, discuss, and plot for institutional changes. The members of cal-pep and St. James Infirmary capitalized on the trend of decentralized service delivery by local level agencies and community-based groups, coupled with the (real and imagined) acute concerns regarding sexually transmitted infections and hiv risks and prevention for sex workers.

The positions of cal-pep and St. James Infirmary as "civic organizations" (29) interested in gathering individuals sharing interests and experiences, and fostering civic socialization and professionalization allows them to engage in the second property of resistance maintenance: community engagement. In other words, they act as "schools of citizenship" (29) by allowing the individuals who receives services to develop civic skills and social capital, in turn enabling them to better work together towards common goals. For sex workers, a group actively marginalized and spoken for by many health and social organizations, this creates a much-needed space for them to be involved in their own care, and to develop civic...