Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work

Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work
Author: Katie Hail-Jares
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2017-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1439914540

Are sex workers victims, criminals, or just trying to make a living? Over the last five years, public policy and academic discourse have moved from criminalization of sex workers to victim-based understanding, shaped by human trafficking. While most research focuses on macro-level policies and theories, less is known about the on-the-ground perspectives of people whose lives are impacted by sex work, including attorneys, social workers, police officers, probation officers, and sex workers themselves. Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work brings the voices of lower-echelon sex workers and those individuals charged with policy development and enforcement into conversation with one another. Chapters highlight some of the current approaches to sex work, such as diversion courts, trafficking task forces, law enforcement assisted diversion and decriminalization. It also examines how sex workers navigate seldom-discussed social phenomenon like gentrification, pregnancy, imperialism, and being subjects of research. Through dialogue, our authors reveal the complex reality of engaging in and regulating sex work in the United States and through American aid abroad. Contributors include: Aneesa A. Baboolal, Marie Bailey-Kloch, Mira Baylson, Nachale “Hua” Boonyapisomparn, Belinda Carter, Jennifer Cobbina, Ruby Corado, Eileen Corcoran, Kate D’Adamo, Edith Kinney, Margot Le Neveu, Martin A. Monto, Linda Muraresku, Erin O’Brien, Sharon Oselin. Catherine Paquette, Dan Steele, Chase Strangio, Signy Toquinto, and the editors.

Selling Sex

Selling Sex
Author: Emily Van der Meulen
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2013
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0774824484

"Despite being dubbed "the world's oldest profession," prostitution has rarely been viewed as a legitimate form of labour. Instead, it has been criminalized, sensationalized, and polemicized across the socio-political spectrum by everyone from politicians to journalists to women's groups. Interest in and concern over sex work is not grounded in the lived realities of those who work in the industry, but rather in inflammatory ideas about who is participating, how they wound up in this line of work, and what form it takes. In Selling Sex, Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love present a more nuanced, balanced, and realistic view of the sex industry. They bring together a vast collection of voices - including researchers, feminists, academics, and advocates, as well as sex workers of differing ages, genders, and sectors - to engage in a dialogue that challenges the dominant narratives surrounding the sex industry and advances the idea that sex work is in fact work. Presenting a variety of opinions and perspectives on such diverse topics as the social stigma of sex work, police violence, labour organizing, anti-prostitution feminism, human trafficking, and harm reduction, Selling Sex is an eye-opening, challenging, and necessary book."--Publisher's website.

Gender Violence, 3rd Edition

Gender Violence, 3rd Edition
Author: Laura L O'Toole
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147980181X

An updated edition of the groundbreaking anthology that explores the proliferation of gendered violence From Harvey Weinstein to Brett Kavanaugh, accusations of gender violence saturate today’s headlines. In this fully revised edition of Gender Violence, Laura L. O’Toole, Jessica R. Schiffman, and Rosemary Sullivan bring together a new, interdisciplinary group of scholars, with up-to-date material on emerging issues like workplace harassment, transgender violence, intersectionality, and the #MeToo movement. Contributors provide a fresh, informed perspective on gender violence, in all of its various forms. With twenty-nine new contributors, and twelve original essays, the third edition now includes emerging contemporary issues such as LGBTQ violence, sex work, and toxic masculinity. A trailblazing text, Gender Violence, Third Edition is an essential read for students, activists, and others.

Red Light Labour

Red Light Labour
Author: Elya M. Durisin
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2018-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774838264

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Canada v. Bedford that key prostitution laws were unconstitutional. The decision provoked wide interest but little new insight into sex work. Red Light Labour addresses Canada’s new legal regime regulating sex work through the analysis of past and present policy approaches and consideration of how laws and those who uphold them have constructed, controlled, and criminalized sex workers, their clients, and their workspaces. This groundbreaking collection also offers nuanced interpretations of commercial sexual labour that foreground the personal perspectives of workers and activists. The contributors highlight the struggle for civic and social inclusion by considering sex workers’ advocacy tactics, successes, and challenges. Red Light Labour promotes social and economic justice within a sex-work-as-labour framework. This book is a timely intervention that showcases up-to-date legal, policy, and social analysis of sex work in Canada.

Sex Work Matters

Sex Work Matters
Author: Melissa Hope Ditmore
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2013-04-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1848138407

Sex Work Matters brings together sex workers, scholars and activists to present pioneering essays on the economics and sociology of sex work. From insights by sex workers on how they handle money, intimate relationships and daily harassment by the police, to the experience of male and transgender sex work, this fascinating and original book offers new theoretical frameworks for understanding the sex industry. The result is a vital new contribution to sex-worker rights that explores the topic in new ways, especially its cultural, economic and political dimensions. Readers weary of the sensational and often salacious treatment of the sex industry in the media and literature will find Sex Work Matters refreshing.

Sex Workers Unite

Sex Workers Unite
Author: Melinda Chateauvert
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-03-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807061239

A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue. Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,” and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition. Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers’ rights as human rights. Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.

Not for Sale

Not for Sale
Author: Rebecca Whisnant
Publisher: Spinifex Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2004
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781876756499

Prostitution and pornography are linked with racism and male dominance as well as with imperialism, militarism (including torture) and global corporate culture. The result is devastating harm for women and children within these industries. Subjected to physical and psychological violence - poverty, drug addiction and homelessness are their usual companions. With its mix of personal stories, theory, research, testimony, and accounts of current activism, Not For Sale will be an invaluable resource for all those seeking to inform themselves about the realities of the sex business and will serve to strengthen and broaden feminist resistance to pornography and prostitution.

Religious Responses to Sex Work and Sex Trafficking

Religious Responses to Sex Work and Sex Trafficking
Author: Lauren McGrow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2022-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1000649458

This book examines the history, theological beliefs and current contextual practices of faith-based NGOs who work in the area of human trafficking that involves the sex industry. There are hundreds of religious organizations around the globe who minister with human trafficking survivors and sex workers, but what is really happening on the ground and how do theological beliefs support a faith-based response? Many of these groups represent their work as a cosmic battle against evil forces, yet important structural critiques are ignored in the urgency to rescue women and children. Using perspectives from both NGO staff and sex workers, an interdisciplinary panel of contributors examine specific organizations, highlight marginalized voices, and analyze undergirding methodologies. In doing so, the authors provide clear critiques and establish best practice guidelines for faith-based NGOs and future religious leaders, affirming an intersection of justice based upon critical reflection and careful action. This book addresses with nuance an important topic that is often over-simplified. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars studying the interaction of religion to sex work and human trafficking, as well as academics of religious studies and theology more generally.

To Live Freely in This World

To Live Freely in This World
Author: Chi Adanna Mgbako
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-01-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1479813931

Sex worker activists throughout Africa are demanding an end to the criminalization of sex work and the recognition of their human rights to safe working conditions, health and justice services, and lives free from violence and discrimination. To Live Freely in This World is the first book to tell the story of the brave activists at the beating heart of the sex workers’ rights movement in Africa—the newest and most vibrant face of the global sex workers’ rights struggle. African sex worker activists are proving that communities facing human rights abuses are not bereft of agency. They’re challenging politicians, religious fundamentalists, and anti-prostitution advocates; confronting the multiple stigmas that affect the diverse members of their communities; engaging in intersectional movement building with similarly marginalized groups; and participating in the larger global sex workers’ rights struggle in order to determine their social and political fate. By locating this counter-narrative in Africa, To Live Freely in This World challenges disempowering and one-dimensional depictions of “degraded Third World prostitutes” and helps fill what has been a gaping hole in feminist scholarship regarding sex work in the African context. Based on original fieldwork in seven African countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda, Chi Adanna Mgbako draws on extensive interviews with over 160 African female and male (cisgender and transgender) sex worker activists, and weaves their voices and experiences into a fascinating, richly-detailed, and powerful examination of the history and continuing activism of this young movement.

Routledge Handbook of Street Culture

Routledge Handbook of Street Culture
Author: Jeffrey Ian Ross
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 596
Release: 2020-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000195058

Discussions of street culture exist in a variety of academic disciplines, yet a handbook that brings together the diversity of scholarship on this subject has yet to be produced. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture integrates and reviews current scholarship regarding the history, types, and contexts of the concept of street culture. It is comprehensive and international in its treatment of the subject of street culture. Street culture includes many subtypes, situations, locations, and participants, and these are explored in the various chapters included in this book. Street culture varies based on numerous factors including capitalism, market societies, policing, ethnicity, and race but also advances in technology. The book is divided into four major sections: Actors and street culture, Activities connected to street culture, The centrality of crime to street culture, and Representations of street culture. Contributors are well respected and recognized international scholars in their fields. They draw upon contemporary scholarship produced in the social sciences, arts, and humanities in order to communicate their understanding of street culture. The book provides a comprehensive and accessible approach to the subject of street culture through the lens of an inter- and/or multidisciplinary perspective. It is also intersectional in its approach and consideration of the subject and phenomenon of street culture.