Resisting division: migrant sex work and “New Zealand working girls”

Abstract

ABSTRACT While New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act has decriminalized sex work for citizens and permanent residents, migrants on temporary visas are still not permitted to work in the sex industry. In 2018, a series of news media texts documented complaints about migrant sex workers put forward by Lisa Lewis, a prominent sex worker. This article considers how the figure of the migrant sex worker was produced through comparison to contingently acceptable ‘New Zealand working girls’. This was partly achieved through a discursive link between sex work and the alleged economic impact of Asian migrants to New Zealand, with the argument that migrant sex workers were impacting the earnings of domestic sex workers. Lewis’ claims were subsequently publicly rejected by other domestic sex workers, who resisted attempts to position them within this discourse. This media event offers evidence of changes to the figure of the sex worker in public discourse post-decriminalization: first in the way that some sex workers may be offered conditional acceptance and recognition of their jobs, and secondly in that it displays active resistance to the stigmatization of prostitution by a group of sex workers.