Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism

Introduction: The Politics of Sex Work

· xiii · The Politics of Sex Work Carisa R. Showden and Samantha Majic In the United States andacrosstheglobe,sexworkers—individuals who exchange sexual services for cash or other goods—often conduct their work clandestinely. The recent politics of sex work, however, are a much more visible matter. In 2008 in San Francisco, for example, prostitutes ’ rights activists spearheaded Proposition K, a ballot measure that would have barred local police officers from arresting or investigating or prosecuting anyone for selling sex. Advocates claimed this would free up $11 million per year in police resources and allow prostitutes to form collectives and defend their rights as workers (YesOnPropK.org 2009). However, they were eventually defeated by a strong campaign by the mayor and district attorney, who claimed Proposition K would limit law enforcement’s ability to curb human trafficking and provide services for victims. As then District Attorney Kamala Harris stated, “We can not give a green light or a pass to predators of young women” (NBC Bay Area 2008). Similar concerns were also expressed that same year in Norway , when it became the second country in the world (after Sweden) to criminalize the purchase of sexual services from prostitutes. When the law passed, Justice Minister Knut Storberget stated, “We want to send a clear message to men that buying sex is unacceptable. Men who do it are taking part in an international crime involving human beings who are trafficked for sex” (Fouché 2007). These debates about the dangers of sexual commerce continued in 2009 at a panel discussion at Harvard Law School that considered the civil rights implications of legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution. Here a sharp division occurred between two professors who supported removing prostitution from the purview of criminal laws and a psychologist and former prostitute who vehemently opposed this practice (Young 2009). Continuing the now decades-long sex wars debate, when the professors· INTRODUCTION · xiv CARISA R. SHOWDEN AND SAMANTHA MAJIC stated that prostitution occurs in many contexts and is experienced differently based on one’s social location and the broader cultural, political, and economic context, the emphatic response from many audience members (comprising social workers, law students, and scholars) was “but prostitution is violence against women!” Such sentiments were apparent again at a 2011 Women’s World Conference in Ottawa, Ontario, that brought together almost 2,000 women from 92 countries, many of whom were concerned about prostitution and human trafficking. However, it also highlighted deep divisions in the feminist movement when sex workers and others supporting the decriminalization of prostitution claimed they were silenced and outnumbered by anti–sex work groups that hurled negative epithets at them in the common spaces and during the conference’s various exhibits and panels (Purvis 2011). This cursory review of recent events indicates that the politics of sex work are not only visible but also (almost) exclusively about prostitution and contests for power between those who view it as legitimate work and those who view selling sex as a form of coercive sexual exploitation (or sex trafficking). Further, with increased globalization, “trafficking in women” has become the metonymic frame for sex work (and prostitution in particular ) in both political discourse and policy practice. As a result, the current politics reflect and reproduce the long-standing, persistent “agent/victim” debate about prostitution (and sex work in general). In the standard form of this debate, agents choose (freely) and victims have no choice. Through both theoretical and empirical arguments, this volume provides a timely and necessary intervention in this debate on two interrelated levels. First, it emphasizes sex workers’ political agency, thereby rejecting the choice/no choice dichotomy that persists in so many discussions of sex work and generates instead a definition of agency as both capacity and action. “Agent” is not an identity (nor is “victim”). It is both a capacity relative to different structural positions people occupy and a way of negotiating structures; thus agents are mobile and their capacities are activated in different ways depending on specific, variable contexts. The chapters in this volume thus indicate how sex workers are political agents who negotiate various social, political, legal, and economic structural circumstances across the globe to challenge the political processes that have largely relegated their voices to the margins. In so doing, they challenge how policymakers, interested groups, and the broader public regard sex workers ’ agency and their perceived lack of legitimate place in the polity. INTRODUCTION xv In...