Identity management, negotiation and resistance among women in the sex trade in London, Ontario

Abstract

Sex work, and ideas about women in the trade, have long been represented as tragic and/or threatening. However, such portrayals tell us very little about how women think about themselves and the kinds of work they do. The data for this paper come from an ethnographic, community-based study in London, Ontario, that involves women in street-based, indoor and transactional sex work. This discussion focuses on how women develop different individual identities, including the management of multiple selves, their sexual identities and what we have termed the ‘good junkie’ identity. We also examine how these women employ aspects of dominant representation of sex workers, namely the low status accorded to those in street-based work and the defamatory term ‘whore’ or ‘ho’, when negotiating the moral hierarchies that exist within various kinds of sex work (i.e., stripping, massage parlours) and making sense of their professional and personal lives. The work that goes into the creation and maintenance of the women's divergent identities sheds important light on this complicated and tremendously demanding, yet inadequately understood, aspect of life as women in the sex trade.