Freedom and Prostitution

Freedom and Prostitution
Author: Cassandra Troyan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2020-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781988979403

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION proposes the dream of a world without work, without money, without gender, while imagining forms of survival now for those who often have little to no choices, refuse to submit to the demands of tedious underpaid or unwaged labor, an abusive partner, or seek a life beyond work. Sex work is not a "better" type of labor but a proposal for the abolition of all work.

Prostitution, Power and Freedom

Prostitution, Power and Freedom
Author: Julia O'Connell Davidson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745668097

Prostitution is still the subject of intense controversy among feminists but theoretical and political analyses are often only loosely grounded in empirical research. This book offers new perspectives on prostitution based on wide-ranging research in nine countries and extensive work with prostitute users.

Brokered Subjects

Brokered Subjects
Author: Elizabeth Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022657380X

Brokered Subjects digs deep into the accepted narratives of sex trafficking to reveal the troubling assumptions that have shaped both right- and left-wing agendas around sexual violence. Drawing on years of in-depth fieldwork, Elizabeth Bernstein sheds light not only on trafficking but also on the broader structures that meld the ostensible pursuit of liberation with contemporary techniques of power. Rather than any meaningful commitment to the safety of sex workers, Bernstein argues, what lies behind our current vision of trafficking victims is a transnational mix of putatively humanitarian militaristic interventions, feel-good capitalism, and what she terms carceral feminism: a feminism compatible with police batons.

The Freedom of the Streets

The Freedom of the Streets
Author: Sharon E. Wood
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2006-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807876534

Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods. The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.

At the Heart of Freedom

At the Heart of Freedom
Author: Drucilla Cornell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 1998-09-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400822556

How can women create a meaningful and joyous life for themselves? Is it enough to be equal with men? In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Drucilla Cornell argues that women should transcend the quest for equality and focus on what she shows is a far more radical project: achieving freedom. Cornell takes us on a highly original exploration of what it would mean for women politically, legally, and culturally, if we took this ideal of freedom seriously--if, in her words, we recognized that "hearts starve as well as bodies." She takes forceful and sometimes surprising stands on such subjects as abortion, prostitution, pornography, same-sex marriage, international human rights, and the rights and obligations of fathers. She also engages with what it means to be free on a theoretical level, drawing on the ideas of such thinkers as Kant, Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Hegel, and Lacan. Cornell begins by discussing what she believes lies at the heart of freedom: the ability for all individuals to pursue happiness in their own way, especially in matters of love and sex. This is only possible, she argues, if we protect the "imaginary domain"--a psychic and moral space in which individuals can explore their own sources of happiness. She writes that equality with men does not offer such protection, in part because men themselves are not fully free. Instead, women must focus on ensuring that individuals face minimal interference from the state and from oppressive cultural norms. They must also respect some controversial individual choices. Cornell argues in favor of permitting same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, for example. She presses for access to abortion and for universal day care. She also justifies lifestyles that have not always been supported by other feminists, ranging from staying at home as a primary caregiver to engaging in prostitution. She argues that men should have similar freedoms--thus returning feminism to its promise that freedom for women would mean freedom for all. Challenging, passionate, and powerfully argued, Cornell's book will have a major impact on the course of feminist thought.

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.

Revolting Prostitutes

Revolting Prostitutes
Author: Molly Smith
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786633604

How the law harms sex workers—and what they want instead Do you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justice? In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make it clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.

The Ironies of Freedom

The Ironies of Freedom
Author: Thu-huong Nguyen-vo
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0295989211

In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice for entrepreneurs and consumers. The Ironies of Freedom examines an aspect of this new market: commercial sex. Nguyen-vo offers an ambitious analysis of gender and class conflicts surrounding commercial sex as a site of market freedom, governmental intervention, and depictions in popular culture to argue that these practices reveal the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism. What the case of Vietnam highlights is that governing with current neoliberal globalization may and does take paradoxical forms, sustained not by some vestige from times past but by contemporary conditions. Of mutual benefit to both the neoliberal global economy and the ruling party in Vietnam is the use of empirical knowledge and entrepreneurial and consumer's choice differentially among segments of the population to produce different kinds of laborers and consumers for the global market. But also of mutual benefit to both are the police, the prison, and notions of cultural authenticity enabled by a ruling party with well-developed means of coercion from its history. The freedom-unfreedom pair in governance creates a tension in modes of representation conducive to a new genre of sensational social realism in literature and popular films like the 2003 Bar Girls about two women in the sex trade, replete with nudity, booze, drugs, violence, and death. The movie opened in Vietnam with unprecedented box office receipts, blazing a trail for a commercially viable domestic film industry. Combining methods and theories from the social sciences and humanities, Nguyen-vo's analysis relies on fieldwork conducted in Ho Chi Minh City and its vicinity, in-depth interviews with informants, participant observation at selected sites of sexual commerce and governmental intervention, journalistic accounts, and literature and films. This book will appeal to historians and political scientists of Southeast Asia and to scholars of gender and sexuality, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and political theory dealing with neoliberalism.

Not a Choice, Not a Job

Not a Choice, Not a Job
Author: JANICE G. RAYMOND
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1612346278

A generation ago, most people did not know how ubiquitous and grave human trafficking was. Now many people agree that the $35.7 billion business is an appalling violation of human rights. But when confronted with prostitution, many people experience an odd disconnect because prostitution is shrouded in myths, among them the claims that ôprostitution is inevitable,ö and ôprostitution is a job or service like any other.ö In Not a Choice, Not a Job, Janice Raymond challenges both the myths and their perpetrators. Raymond demonstrates that prostitution is not sex but sexual exploitation, and that legalizing and decriminalizing the system of prostitutionùas opposed to the prostituted womenùpromotes sex trafficking, expands the sex industry, and invites organized crime. Specifically, Raymond exposes how legalized prostitution in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, and Nevada worsens crime and endangers women. In contrast, she reveals, when governments work to prevent the demand for prostitution by prosecuting pimps, brothels, and prostitution usersùas in Norway, Sweden, and Icelandùtrafficking does not increase, women are better protected, and fewer men buy sex. Raymond expands the boundaries of scholarship in womenÆs studies, making this book indispensable to human rights advocates around the world.

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal
Author: Jean-Luc Hennig
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1584350784

Reflections of a “revolutionary whore” and champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes' rights. They have to come back to us, because we know every detail of their orgasms, their little caprices, their little weaknesses and strengths. We know all of them. I mean, where do you expect them to go? They'll be disappointed anywhere else. Except for with us, because we know them like the back of our hand. As soon as they get in the door, it's like we'd made them ourselves. We know all the right things to say, all the gestures, there're no surprises. —from The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is the portrait of a true humanist who made a career out of compassion. Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client's incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes' rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists...who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart...” This volume includes lengthy dialogues from 1979–1981 with Réal conducted by journalist and author Jean-Luc Henning, in which she eloquently discusses the theoretical implications of sex-positive whoring and relates her experiences both inside and outside the profession: from her lengthy love affair with the “Berber” to such “psychological” and “special” clients as the “moldy rhinoceros.” The “Little Black Book” that rounds out this book is drawn from the logs in which Réal kept track of her many clients, from “Pedro, hilarious fat Spaniard, devoted, simple, honest, fat peasant face, 70F” to “Pierre 8 (from Basel), blue eyes, fifties, slightly balding, cultivated, sweet-violent...licks my finger after I remove it from his anus...100–400F.” It is a journal that not only chronicles Réal's working life, but offers a clinically direct, investigative sociological analysis of the sexual subcultures of her time.