Sex Work and the Regulation of Vulnerability(ies): Introduction

Abstract

This special issue focuses on the contemporary discourses and practices that have emerged, both nationally and internationally, around women’s vulnerability to sexual harm. More specifically, it provides an interdisciplinary feminist critique of the racialised and gendered ways in which women’s vulnerability to ‘sexual exploitation’ has often been constructed and responded to. The majority of the papers included here expand upon initial discussions undertaken by their authors at an invited panel, convened by the editors and hosted at the ‘Good Sex, Bad Sex’ conference in Prague in 2010. By bringing these papers together in this collection, our aim is to move towards a stronger feminist intellectual framework for accommodating, engaging with and resisting, the strategic ways in which discourses of women’s vulnerability are deployed by those who govern. Across the special issue, we offer a series of articles that—without denying the concept’s emotive and progressive potential—examine how the cultural and moral discourses of women’s sexual vulnerability have been used, and misused, in order to advance specific political agendas, thereby generating negative as well as positive impacts upon women’s lives. None of the contributors in this collection seek to deny the reality of women’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation, nor do they suggest that governments across the globe do not have a vital role to play in protecting women from sexual harm and upholding their human rights. But this does not preclude us from counselling caution regarding the ways in which the label of vulnerability is constructed, applied and deployed in contemporary debates around sexual exploitation, where a range of other social, economic and political agendas are implicated.