Gendered Street Capitalism and the Violence of the American Dream

Abstract

This chapter utilizes results from an immersive six-year, mixed-methods study to analyze decision-making among women in street prostitution as they navigate multiple forms of socioeconomic exclusion. While scholars usually frame street prostitution by using one of three lenses—misogynistic exploitation, mutually beneficial exchange, or stigma-related harm—this chapter adds a new perspective, which I term gendered street capitalism. This framework deliberately situates sexual labor within the totalizing sex-money-drugs-violence nexus that governs quotidian interactions within the street prostitution and illicit drug economy. Gendered street capitalism is an extreme form of neoliberal capitalism because participants in the prostitution and the illicit drug economy conduct their business outside the realm of any bureaucratic regulation beyond the threat of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. Like its licit neoliberal counterpart, gendered street capitalism exists as a commodified enabler to the American Dream in a society dominated by money. Both forms exist due to the precarity of contemporary economic systems that otherwise exclude those who are trapped in the lower echelons and excluded as decision makers. Yet, participants in the street economy, like those in its licit counterpart, adopt rhetorical narratives that embrace the values of entrepreneurship, freedom, and individualism celebrated at the violent heart of the twenty-first-century capitalist American Dream to explain and justify their life choices.