Introduction: Sexual Economies and New Regimes of Governance

Abstract

In the final weeks of 2013, two divergent interventions into the politics of prostitution met with a raft of international media attention, reigniting longstanding debates about the relationship between sexual commerce, gendered power, states and social policies. In France, the lower house of Parliament passed a bill which would impose heavy fines on prostitutes’ clients, at the same time offering job training and social assistance to sex workers to help them find other employment. In so doing, the bill’s supporters reflected the increasingly prevalent consensus among policymakers in Europe that prostitutes should be treated as victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation, rather than criminal offenders. A mere two weeks later, the Canadian Supreme Court made headlines when it struck down the entirety of the nation’s anti-prostitution laws, declaring that state restrictions on activities such as brothel-keeping, public communications between sex workers and their clients, and living off the profits of prostitution were far too sweeping. Notably, the successful challenge to the Canadian criminal code was filed by both former and current sex workers, who argued that the legal prohibitions—but not sex work itself—gravely endangered their health and safety. Given the history of the contentious and sharply divided feminist debate around the state regulation of sexual commerce, what was perhaps less surprising was that both the Canadian ruling and the French bill were celebrated as unambiguous victories by their respective sides. 2 And yet, as discussions of the French and Canadian cases continue to unfold, 3 they have a very familiar ring to those of us who have been following political debates around prostitution over the span of recent decades. For example, in a remarkable foreshadowing of current French/Canadian contrasts, in the late 1990s and early 2000s feminists polarized around the relative merits of the “Swedish” versus the “Dutch” policy models. In 1998, Sweden became the first country in the world to criminalize the customers of prostitutes, while at the same time, the Dutch were attempting to legally regulate a previously decriminalized sex industry. 4 Following my own ethnographic investigations into the impact of the new policies in Stockholm and Amsterdam, I was most struck by the common reconfigurations of sexual commerce that characterized the two cases: despite radically different policies pertaining to the sex trade, both cities were moving towards the elimination of prostitution from city streets and to the