Sexual Labor Research Articles

Towards Greater Civility: Public Morality and Transversal Queer/Feminist Politics in India

This paper explores how queer/feminist practices and articulations—by offering critical perspectives on the intersections of caste, labour and sexuality—have tried to draw attention to the marginalisation of people expressing non-normative genders and sexualities. Adapting lessons from the women’s movement, which resonates with some of the principles of an Ambedkarite vision of democracy, queer and feminist activists adopt and practise a transversal politics in continuing their struggle for solidarity and justice. Specifically, the paper addresses how queer/feminists use the transversal dialogic political space to highlight contentions around sexual labour, from the 2005 ban on bar dancers to the 2017 Chalo Nagpur campaign. The practice of this politics draws upon the experience of queer and feminist collectives in western India, and finds resonance with Ambedkar’s radical conception of democracy via a steadfast commitment to learn and engage in politics under changed circumstances.

Sexual Orientation and Labor Force Participation: Findings from Chile and Uruguay

ABSTRACTThis is the first study that examines the association between sexual orientation and labor force participation in Chile and Uruguay. Using information on heads of households and their partners from recent census data, it applies a simple econometric methodology to measure the relationship of sexual orientation and labor participation, juxtaposing individuals who are part of straight and same-sex couples, while determining any difference in this association according to gender. The study finds that partnered gay men are up to 5.0 percentage points less likely to participate in the workforce compared to married straight men. In addition, lesbians are up to 32.7 percentage points more likely to participate in the labor force compared to married straight women. Trends between the two countries are similar, but the likelihood of participating in the labor force differs significantly. Conservatism in the cultural context and legal frameworks of each country arises as a possible explanation.

Whores in the Religious Marketplace: Sex-Positivity's Roots in Commercial Sex Cultures

Whores in the Religious MarketplaceSex-Positivity's Roots in Commercial Sex Cultures Jayne Swift (bio) In late 1976 the Church of Venus opened its doors at 1414 First Avenue—"sandwiched" between adult bookstores and theaters on what, during the 1970s, was colloquially known as Seattle's "Flesh Avenue."1 Before it even opened its doors, a columnist for the Seattle Times, curious about the descriptor "Church" on a street known for sin, would begin chronicling the organization's purported mission.2 Founded by local adult business entrepreneur Ron Peterson (who was principal owner of the adjacent peep show, the Amusement Center), the Church of Venus distinguished itself from its neighbors through its professed spiritual commitment to sexuality as an arena of self-enrichment and a force for social good.3 Specifically, the Church sought to spread the word of "sex-positivity" to publics lacking a robust ethics from which to affirm the value of sexuality untethered from the family form, reproduction, or romantic love. The Church quickly achieved local notoriety for its ethics of sex-positivity and its mission to create both public and commercial spaces for the practice of sex-positivity. How did a small iconoclastic community come to disseminate a view of sexual commerce as a tool for facilitating spiritual growth and healing? And how was their sex-positive vision situated within a changing historical paradigm by which sexuality was increasingly seen as an aspect of selfhood that individuals should deliberately, conscientiously cultivate? In this article I argue that people in the sex trade were primary developers of sex-positivity and that sex-positivity was a political resource for challenging their criminalization and marginalization. For the purposes of this article, sex-positivity refers to an ethico-spiritual framework that critiqued the rigid regulation of sexual practice by dominant institutions and the state; affirmed sexual exploration as a site of personal and collective meaning making; argued that this exploration was often constrained by socially entrenched, dogmatic moralities; and promoted sexual freedom through the development of physical infrastructure [End Page 93] and alternative communities. Emboldened by the greater visibility of commercial sex economies in city centers during the 1970s, people in the sex trade deployed sex-positivity to redefine commercial sex, perhaps paradoxically, as a space for the production of caring sexual exchanges among strangers in a market-based society understood as simultaneously sexually and spiritually impoverished. Reconstructing the Church's history through legal records, press coverage, its presence in popular culture, and oral history interviews with those who offered legal testimony on the Church's behalf illustrates how people in the sex trade came to disseminate new ideas about the value of sexual labor and its place in US society, via sex-positive ethico-spiritualities. Unsurprisingly, the perspectives of male entrepreneurs, reporters, and court officials are most accessible, but women were also involved in the Church as crafters of its mission, performers interpreting and enacting its mission, patrons, and (real and fictionalized) advocates. These sources, reflecting the shifting but still potent terms of racial politics in post-Fordist cities, are also quiet on the subject of race. However, religion, and specifically Christianity as a national norm, is omnipresent in these sources. In the post-Civil Rights era, religious morality may have functioned as a seemingly race-neutral term for exerting racialized social control over the public sphere and workers in informal and illicit economies. Across these disparate sources and over a period of years, Church participants espoused an ethics of sex-positivity to audiences (such as the press, police, and judges) who were often baffled by and hostile to it. A historian can never truly know what was in the mind of their subjects, but what emerges from these sources and stakeholders is a clear and consistent defense of sexual labor on the basis that those performing it were non-traditional experts providing a sexual service that held spiritual and ethical value, and they thus had legal rights. The history of this specific counterinstitution evinces how people in the sex trades, in the face of public suspicion, sought to redefine the social value of sexual labor via a distinctive sex-positive worldview, which they assembled from new religious...

Entrevista a Shelley Cavalieri. La propiedad como derecho de las mujeres y los sistemas sanitario y migratorio en los Estados Unidos

Entrevista realizada en la ciudad de Quito el 1 de octubre de 2018 a la profesora e investigadora Shelley Cavalieri, ganadora de la beca Fullbright para desarrollar su proyecto en Ecuador. En esta entrevista se discute sobre su trabajo de investigación, el cual plantea la propiedad como mecanismo de defensa y garantía de los derechos de las mujeres y su vinculación jurídica con los estudios de la Teoría Legal Feminista. Asimismo, de manera general, se reflexiona alrededor de temas de relevancia jurídica tales como la trata de personas y la descriminalización del trabajo sexual, y los sistemas sanitario y migratorio de Estados Unidos.

Sexual Orientation and Earnings: New Evidence from the UK

Most prior work on sexual orientation and labour market earnings has relied either on individual-level surveys with small samples of sexual minorities or has used large samples of same-sex couples. We use a large individual-level dataset that allows us to measure both constructs. We replicate the well-documented lesbian advantage and gay male penalty in couples-based comparisons but show that these effects are absent in similarly specified models of non-partnered workers. This suggests both that couples-based samples overstate the true earnings differences attributable to a minority sexual orientation and that household specialisation plays an important role in the lesbian earnings advantage. Finally, we discuss how the effects reconcile with theories of specialisation and discrimination.

A Communitas of Hustle and the Queer Logic of Inmate Sex (Anti) Work

A Communitas of Hustle and the Queer Logic of Inmate Sex (Anti) Work Deena Varner (bio) The Annex appears to be operating smoothly with the exception of difficulties related to female inmates suffering mental health problems. Inmates of the Allegheny County Jail v. Wecht, 19881 When you have a cross-gendered facility which consists of female and male corrections officers with a female inmate population, this presents an elementary problem when a male correctional officer is assigned to work female housing pods alone. He is placed in a precarious position. Albert P. De Amicis, Ret. Captain, Allegheny County Jail2 According to dozens of news reports from the mid-2000s, the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was embroiled in a “sex scandal.” In 2004 approximately fifteen indictments were brought against corrections officers and other staff members for participating in sexual relationships with women inmates under their supervision; at least seven were convicted.3 In 2006 another four indictments were brought against eight additional staff members, including four corrections officers, for smuggling drugs into the institution.4 In 2011 another officer was sentenced for sexually assaulting a female inmate,5 and a nurse working at the institution pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual contact with inmates.6 At the end of 2015 yet another officer was arraigned on charges of sexual assault.7 The law itself is unambiguous: inmates cannot consent to have sex with prison staff.8 But in what was often referred to as a “sex for favors scandal” in the local news, women inmates were inscribed simply as (the) addicts and prostitutes (they already were) practicing sex work with their guards for “favors,” cigarettes, and drugs.9 This article attempts to grapple with the complexities of the relationships, both sexual and non-sexual, between inmates and staff members at the [End Page 208] Allegheny County Jail, especially during the period of 2003–2005. While sexual misconduct has continued at the jail, the “scandal” that erupted during these years made public the vastness and immediacy of a dilemma that previously had failed to garner any real local attention; I also happened to be detained in this facility during much of the same period. I wish to complicate the two predominant readings of this “scandal” as they take shape in the media and the popular imagination—in which inmates were either the victims of sexual assault or guilty of (criminal) prostitution—and to consider how and why it is the inmates, in these accounts, rather than the officers or the institution, who produce the scandals in question. While sexual and sexualized violence is constitutive of the prison industrial complex,10 sex, including sexual violence but also sexual labor and sexual pleasure, does not function in the same way for all individuals or across all institutions. Many times inmates and corrections staff coexist along a continuum of carceral space-time in which their lived experiences are sometimes more similar than different. These lives, sometimes shared only on the inside, sometimes shared on both the inside and the outside, exceed the purported boundaries of the institution: inmates and the staff members who supervise them are often part of the same networks of family and friends both inside and outside the jail, and the forced and enforced hierarchy of staff-inmate often unravels under closer scrutiny. Many corrections officers detest their jobs, jobs that pay well and are available but ask them to perform functions that are inherently violent and, in many cases, operate within a system of deeply embedded misogyny and other forms of hatred, jobs that ask them to become agents of violence. While remaining in these jobs of course reinscribes the real and ideological violence of the penal system, many officers resist some of that violence by ignoring rules, failing or refusing to implement discipline, developing intimacies (although not necessarily sexual intimacies) with each other and with inmates, and hustling. An officer risks the job in these situations, as well as risking civil and criminal action, much as an inmate risks something every time she has sex in jail. The differences between, complexities within, and contradictions across institutions serve to complicate what are often rather static notions...

Surveilling Social Difference: Black Women’s "Alley Work" in Industrializing Minneapolis

This article examines the arrest records of black women who worked as sex workers in downtown Minneapolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were referred to as “alley workers.” I demonstrate the ways in which black women’s alley work documents the coming together of photography and surveillance as constitutive of the broader project of the modernization of police work through the procedures of standardization offered by the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification. I draw on women of color feminism, visual cultural studies, and critical race studies to analyze the alley work historical archive as a representational account of black women’s sexual regulation. My argument is that the Bertillon system’s attempts to categorize alley work functions as a strategy of surveillance that regulates black women’s economic and social difference. The police’s efforts to identify alley work as economically transgressive positions black sexual labor as an unruly site of social management in the context of industrializing Minneapolis.

Touching intimacy: Bodywork, affect and the caring ethic in erotic gay massage in Taiwan

This paper explores the relatively unexamined topic of interactions between corporeal and affective dimensions in male sexual labour, focusing on the role of intimacy in the bodywork of erotic gay massage in Taiwan. Feminist perspectives on bodywork and affective embodiment are used to analyse how intimacy is lived out during commodified same‐sex engagements. Drawing upon in‐depth interviews with 34 self‐identified gay masseurs, I examine two prominent servicing features of male‐for‐male massage: crafted intimacy and unscripted care. Whereas the former refers to the ‘boyfriend experience’ built up through tactile encounters, the latter regards erotic services as caring practices for the socially vulnerable, adding a moral dimension to the cultural significance of gay sexual commerce in Taiwan. This paper concludes that corporeal and affective dimensions are inseparable in understanding gay massage. Further research can benefit from more attention to somatic affection in the interplay between bodywork and intimacy in male sexual labour.

Identifying and Assisting Sexually Exploited and Trafficked Patients Seeking Women's Health Care Services.

It is estimated that 21 million people are trafficked worldwide, including 11.4 million women and girls. Approximately 4.5 million are forced to do sexual labor. The exact prevalence of human trafficking is difficult to ascertain, however, given the limitations of data collection in an illegal industry. Obstetrician-gynecologists should not only be aware of the widespread nature of human trafficking, but also have the tools to assess patients for trafficking and respond to victim identifications. Patients may present with signs of physical abuse, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance use, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, and nonspecific somatic complaints. As with intimate partner violence, clinicians should be suspicious if the patient is accompanied by an individual who refuses to leave her side. Other potential red flags include patients with wounds in various stages of healing, patients appearing fearful or unable to answer specific questions, and patients who do not have any personal identification. Health care providers should speak with the patient privately, using professional interpreters when indicated. Although there are no validated screening questions for the health care setting, in this article, we provide sample questions such as, "Is anyone forcing you to do anything physically or sexually that you do not want to do?" The physical examination should be thorough with appropriate workup, sexually transmitted infection prophylaxis, and emergency contraception. Physicians and patients should be aware of their state's mandatory reporting requirements and careful documentation is essential. Finally, to ensure a comprehensive, interdisciplinary response to trafficked patients, practitioners should engage hospital-based and community-based services when appropriate.

The Female Accomplice: Rape and the Servant Problem in Roxana

This article evaluates the servant rape in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) against conduct literature on the “servant problem,” and particularly against Defoe’s multiple tracts on servants and supposedly promiscuous female domestic labourers. Like contemporary conduct writing, Roxana’s rape narrative expresses intersecting social anxieties among employer classes over commerce infiltrating the domestic sphere and uncertainty related to contracted servants’ virtue and obedience. Roxana specifically reflects conduct writers’ association of female servants’ disloyalty with sexual promiscuity. Yet, unlike Defoe’s conduct literature, which avoids discussing servant rape, Roxana reflects the normalization of rape of female domestics. I argue that the novel’s representation of rape deflects blame from male authority within the private sphere onto a female accomplice engaged in sexual labour beyond the bounds of the middle-class household. The narrative thus draws on the common occurrence of the rape of female servants but, at the same time, removes culpability from a readership whom Defoe protects as an ideologically moral employer class.

Un/forgettable histories of US camptown prostitution in South Korea: Women’s experiences of sexual labor and government policies

The military camptown in South Korea is a legacy of colonialism and a symbol of national insecurity in Korean history. From September 1945, when US troops arrived on the Korean peninsula for a transfer of power from the Japanese colonial empire, until the present day, the presence of American soldiers and military bases has been a familiar feature of Korean society. The purpose of this article is to trace the history of the US military camptown in Korea, adding the intersection of hidden stories of women’s experiences. Based on an analysis of life stories of 14 former prostitutes and other primary and secondary sources, this article explores the ways in which the Korean government cooperated with US (military) interests in the systematic construction and maintenance of a system of camptown prostitution in the period from 1950 to 1980, with changes in policy from tacit permission to permissive promotion and then active support. During this process, women in camptowns experienced absurd, unjust and contradictory sociopolitical changes relating to international relations and national policies, as well as community attitudes toward and treatment of them in their vulnerable state. However, these women were neither absolute sexual objects nor helpless victims. Women in camptowns managed to carve out spaces for themselves and change their material conditions, cultural identities, and even their legal status, demonstrating their struggle for survival. In this way, women in camptowns represent a symbol of transgression against both androcentric Korean society and ethnocentric nationalism.

Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the "Magic Mike" Series

This essay analyses the theatricalized performance of stripping in the popular films Magic Mike (2013; dir. Steven Soderbergh) and its sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015; dir. Gregory Jacobs). As several pieces about the series have argued, the filmmakers align making oneself an object of desire with an ideology of the ‘entrepreneurial subject’—a versatile and flexible subject suited for a post-Fordist economy—through the figure of ‘Magic’ Mike, a contemporary factotum, played by the charismatic Channing Tatum. Following a critical dance studies approach that attends to the intersection of body and gesture with socio-political, historical, and economic structures, I suggest theatricalized sexual labour in these films reveals the racial exclusions from the ideology of entrepreneurship. Key to my reading is the concept of ‘magic’, part of Mike’s nom de strip. Mike, the hegemonically masculine, heterosexual, white male protagonist, is magic because he is magnetic and effortlessly talented, in such a way that even the material world seems animated by his thrusting pelvis. Magic functions as an ideological device that attempts to hide the labour of training and performance as well as the structures of production in which this labour takes place. Considering the appropriation of black aesthetics in Magic Mike XXL’s performances of striptease, the film seeks to evaporate the spectre of race, that is, the way the white fantasy of the entrepreneurial subject is supported by the appropriation of racialized and especially black labour. While the narrative does not confront the appropriation of black labour directly, an analysis of the performances of striptease shows the film working through the issue on another level, in the complex entanglement of flesh and fantasy, agency and objectification, and racial and gendered desire.

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article explores the discursive and practical entanglements of women’s work and sex trafficking, in Britain and internationally, in the early twentieth century. It examines discussions about trafficking and women’s work during a period that was instrumental in codifying modern, international conceptions of ‘trafficking’ and argues that porous and faulty borders were drawn between sex work, women’s licit work, and their sexual exploitation and their exploitation as workers. These borders were at their thinnest in discussions about two very important sectors of female-dominated migrant labour: domestic and care work, and work in the entertainment industry. The anti-trafficking movement, the international labour movement, and the makers of national laws and policies, attempted to separate sexual labour from other forms of labour. In doing so, they wilfully ignored or suppressed moments when they obviously intersected, and downplayed the role of other exploited and badly-paid licit work that sustained the global economy. But these attempts were rarely successful: despite the careful navigations of international and British officials, work continued to find its way back into discussions of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking remained entangled with the realities of women’s work.

Gender and Sexual Labor Near the End of Life: Advanced Breast Cancer and Femininity Norms

Feminist researchers have highlighted the increased hyper- and heterosexualization of breast cancer by drawing attention to the gendered dimensions of disease. In a set of interviews with women diagnosed with metastatic disease, I examined how participants labored to fulfill feminine gender and sexual ideals. Two themes were explored: gender labor, which included feeling fat and unattractive, and sexual labor, which included managing partners' sexual demands and sexual pain. This study builds on emergent feminist critiques that challenge expectations for a woman to be a “sexy cancer patient” and highlights how gender and sexual ideals continue to affect women negatively, even when they are extremely ill.

Authorizing Illicit Intimacies: Filipina–gi Interracial Relations in the Postwar Philippines

Intimate relations between American servicemen (GIs) and Filipina women increased visibly following the Second World War in the Philippines. As interactions became routine, women who developed close interpersonal relationships with GIs became associated with vice and loose morals. This article analyzes the multiple forces that maintained such associations, including the US military and local government’s interconnected forms of intimate management and Philippine cultural productions’ contradictory depictions of Filipino–American intimacies. It argues that the “bar system,” which arose from businesses exploiting sexual labor, the legal system combating prostitution, and health initiatives seeking to eradicate venereal disease, effectively authorized illicit intimacies. Keywords: US military • gender relations • race relations • sexual labor • Philipp ine culture

Mangala Bansode and the Social Life of Tamasha: Caste, Sexuality, and Discrimination in Modern Maharashtra

Over the past three decades there has been an increasing academic interest in the field of popular culture and cultural studies. However, in the Indian context there is little study about the popular practices of caste-based cultural forms and sexual labor. Most significantly, scholars have rarely considered the so-called immoral and vulgar folk art of Tamasha (folk theater) and the lives of Tamasgiranchya (Tamasha performers) worthy of systematic analyses. In this essay, I deploy the oral history and life narrative of a Dalit Tamasgir woman, Mangalatai Bansode, to examine the hitherto unexplored potentials and problems of intimate and interlocking technologies of deviant sexuality, labor, and struggle for survival; the community's social, cultural, and political battles; private and public patriarchy; and Maharashtra state's politics regarding folk culture. I provide micro-level details of Tamasgiranchya's historical experiences of poverty, hunger, education or the lack thereof, occupation, and the strategic deployment of khandani business, body politics, and sexual economy of erotic excess. I unravel how ruling elites both in colonial and postcolonial periods constructed Tamasha as a despised form of hereditary performance, and how Tamasgir women have had to struggle constantly to preserve their honor within and without the Dalit community, enhance their social status, and earn their family's livelihood. Ironically, Tamasha continues to be a degraded form of performance that has provided possibilities and power, however limited, to some women.

Offloaded: Women's Sex Work Migration across the South China Sea and the Gendered Antitrafficking Emigration Policy of the Philippines

Economic globalization has increased the accessibility and scope of sexual labor markets in various parts of the world, which have become increasingly reliant upon migrant labor. This essay examines the labor migration of independent sex workers from the Philippines who turn to sex work in global cities as a form of livelihood otherwise denied to them at home. Analyzing how the Philippine government's antitrafficking emigration policy has hampered women's ability to work in other countries, this essay illustrates how antitrafficking policies can result in a paradoxical limitation of women's freedom of movement.

‘Enhance her pleasure – and your grip strength’: Men’s Health magazine and pseudo-reciprocal pleasure

This paper provides a snapshot of the Top Ten free, digital Men’s Health magazine articles, accessed on a randomly selected day, that can be viewed as a collection; both a product for readership consumption and a construct of readership priorities. Through close textual analysis, we examine how discourses about masculinity, heterosex and consumerism have intersected to create a model of masculinity based on the discipline of male pleasure, which impacts on men’s approach to female pleasure and gender dynamics. The analysis contributes to the developing research about the sexual and bodily discourses the magazine promotes and identifies a model of masculinity where men can ‘have their cake and eat it’; seeming to adhere to ideals of gender equality and reciprocity while retaining their traditional patriarchal position of producer/provider. They are encouraged to do so by approaching female orgasm as a product, which they can ‘purchase’ through adhering to Men’s Health magazine’s sexual advice and bodily labour at control, delay and discipline of their own pleasure and orgasm. We argue that this approach to sex disenfranchises men, and in turn their partners, of opportunities to access alternative models of embodied pleasure.

“Home and beautiful things”: Aspirational politics in dance bars in India

This article examines the controversy surrounding women’s sexual labor of dancing in the city of Mumbai in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Whereas much of the debate around the dance bars focuses on bar dancers’ livelihood and right to work, I turn the discussion to the realm of desire and consumption to show how intimate labor is connected to class aspirations. Using legal, media and cultural sources, I suggest that the intimate labor in dance bars produces new aspirations for bar dancers. These aspirations are made possible by the specific labor and exchange conditions and relational possibilities that are specific to the bars, illustrating what I call the aspirational politics of sex, where sexual labor acts as a site for individual existential pursuits such as social mobility and a sense of well-being. Dance bars offer young women from marginalized communities the opportunity for livelihood and social mobility as well as access to middle-class lifestyles through involvement in new consumer cultures but without the corresponding status or protection of being middle class. Additionally, by analyzing the politics around the ban on dancing in Mumbai, the article reveals the cultural conflicts inherent in sexual labor and illuminates an important arena where women can mobilize hegemonic discourses to serve their own interests and stretch the limits of their subordination.

Introduction: Special issue on technologies of intimate labour

This article introduces the concept of ‘technologies of intimate labour’, which refers to practices of intimate labour that forge identities, enable self-actualization, and allow self-growth. It describes the two underlying themes that bring together this special issue: aspirational politics of sex or sexual identity and the moral regimes of sexual labour.