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Article Excerpt
THIS PAPER IS BASED ON RESEARCH UNDERTAKEN through interviews with 60 sex workers (48 women, 10 men, 2 transgendered women) ranging in age from 18-52 years (mean = 32 years) in three Maritime cities. This research was designed to "hear" sex workers' own analyses of their lives, their work and the world around them. During the thirty-minute to hour-long, open-ended interview process we asked sex workers what were the best and worst parts of their job; how they were viewed and treated by police, outreach workers, officials, the media and the general public, and how they thought policies around sex work ought to change. In this article we focus on their response to "What is the best part of this work?" which nearly universally was: the money. We argue that while "money" may have been the quick answer to what was good about sex work among our interviewees, this answer did net imply that that these women and men were simply pushed into the trade by economic forces. Rather, as we shall see, they often made careful decisions about the economic choices available to them--such as minimum-wage work or welfare and between indoor or street-based sex work. These decisions were based not just on money but on the amount of independence each option offered. Thus, our interviewees were no different than most Maritimers who, in an economy marked by un- and under-employment (Acheson, Frank and Frost, 1985), "cobble together a living" among the options available, but do not accept attempts to marginalize them. Therefore, the tag line "honey" is meant to indicate that what sex workers are resisting through sex work is not simply the risk of poverty or underpayment in the "straight" world, but the hegemonic discourses that render sex workers benighted objects of intervention and management rather than economic and political agents. In this article we argue that understanding how sex workers actively resist attempts to cheapen their labour is key both to creating policy that "works" for sex workers and to challenging the economic and political power structures that can constrain sex workers' lives.
The Problem with Theory
Part of the difficulty with sociological theorizing relative to the sex trade is, generally speaking, part of the problem with sociological theory. Theory usually comes from "above" rather than "below," from the "top down" rather than from the "ground up." Involved in our attempts to deviate from solely theoretical explanations of sex work is the fact that there is a hegemonic discourse around sex work. It is a discourse that dominates any understanding of the lives of sex workers or the realities they face. Furthermore, it judges sex workers, reinforces their pathological stigmatization and, even in attempts to portray the sex worker as "victim," infantilizes her, denies her of agency and is contextual in explanation. Our claim is that sex workers themselves are the experts on their lives, and that, before making proclamations on the "why," "how" and "where" of sex work, all academics, journalists and policy makers really need to talk to these workers. In this way, any theory formulated will truly come from the "ground up."
Studies that do pay close attention to sex workers' own voices show that they overwhelmingly view sex work as a job, and that some are fairly well paid and independent while others are net (Benoit and Millar, 2001; Bruckert, Parent and Robitaille, 2003; Chapkis, 1997; McLeod, 1982; Perkins, 1991; Sanders, 2005). Indeed, as early as 1982, McLeod (1982) drew attention to sex work as resistance. Our discussion here confirms these findings, but we seek to show that this resistance is not only economic (i.e., it is not simply "coping" or "managing risk"). Rather, it is also a social and political resistance to being constructed as "cheap labour" or the deserving object of managerial or government intervention and control. Thus, paying attention to the words of workers themselves can also give us new insight into the continuing feminist debates over sex work--whether it is exploitation, work or sexual liberation.
There has been much discussion of the long-standing divide between those who view sex work as exploitation (Bars, 1995; Jeffreys, 1997; Stark and Whisnant, 2005) and those who view it as work. However, there is also a substantial debate among those who view sex work as work as to the role of constraining structures in shaping or limiting that work and the amount of agency exercised by sex workers (O'Connell Davidson, 1998; O'Neill, 2001; Sanders, 2005; Phoenix, 1999; van der Veen, 2001). Finally, there is also a divide between those who focus mainly on the work aspects and those of a more postmodern stripe who focus on sex work as a form of liberated sexuality and/or resistant identity (Bell, 1994; Queen, 1997; Nagle, 2002). Within this last debate, there has been concern that to focus on how sex workers resist the prevailing constructions of sexuality, gender and hetero-normativity is to "celebrate" that which is, in fact, a job taken up within constrained circumstances (Scoular, 2004: 348-49). Sex workers' own words and analyses draw attention to how their work is both shaped by economic and social structures and a form of resistant identity--not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of resisting the power of neo-liberal discourse and discipline by refusing to internalize the way they are positioned as workers in the "straight" workplace. Sex workers who are not academics or theorists (and some who are) draw our attention to the role discursive power--including that contained in academic theorizing--plays in suppressing or silencing precisely that which is resistant, and therefore potentially politically powerful, in sex work and in sex workers (Lerum, 1999). That is, sex workers draw attention to the way that they fight back against being constructed as "objects" of theorizing, or governance, or workplace discipline, and challenge the meaning of sex work as it is imposed by others. Paying attention to this challenge---taking the words of sex workers seriously--is key to creating the conditions that can make sex work less exploitative and more liberatory.
A Note on Method
Methodological work that captures qualitative understandings, such as ethnomethodology or ethnography, is closer to what this work achieves than are surveys and questionnaires. We asked a small set of questions and allowed the sex workers to set their own pace in answering. We paid a small honorarium to each worker for...
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