Queer Sex Work

Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher, Nicola Smith, Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher, Nicola Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134495481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

Sex work is a subject of significant contestation across academic disciplines, as well as within legal, medical, moral, feminist, political and socio-cultural discourses. A large body of research exists, but much of this focuses on the sale of sex by women to men and ignores other performances, practices, meanings and embodiments in the contemporary sex industry. A queer agenda is important in order to challenge hetero-centric gender norms and to develop new insights into how gender, sex, power, crime, work, migration, space/place, health and intimacy are understood in the context of commercial sexual encounters.

Queer Sex Work explores what it might mean to 'be', 'do' and 'think' queer(ly) in the study and practice of commercial sex. It brings together a multiplicity of empirical case studies – including erotic dance venues, online sex working, pornography, grey sexual economies, and BSDM – and offers a variety of perspectives from academic scholars, policy practitioners, activists and sex workers themselves. In so doing, the book advances a queer politics of sex work that aims to disrupt heteronormative logics whilst also making space for different voices in academic and political debates about commercial sex.

This unique and multidisciplinary volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of the global sex trade and of gender, sexuality, feminism and queer theory more broadly, as well as policymakers, activists and practitioners interested in the politics and practice of sex work in local, national and international contexts.

1 Being, thinking and doing ‘queer’ in debates about commercial sex

Nicola Smith, Mary Laing and Katy Pilcher

Commercial sex work is the subject of significant contestation in contemporary legal, medical, moral, feminist, religious and social debates. Across the world, regulatory frameworks and legal systems are in flux, as governments negotiate complex discursive and material practices of commercial sex, and seek to shape law and legislation centred on notions of sexual citizenship, health, safety, human rights, exploitation, violence and morality. In addition, there is now a wealth of research that interrogates and documents how sex is sold in a plethora of spaces, through multiple mechanisms, by a multitude of actors, for diverse reasons (see for instance Agustín 2007; Kotiswaran 2011; Weitzer 2005). In highlighting the complexities of commercial sex in analytical and empirical terms, this literature has done much to expose and challenge the entrenched polarities – such as those between oppression and liberation, violence and pleasure, and victimhood and agency – that have long underpinned political and philosophical debates surrounding the sale and purchase of sex. For example, commercial sex has been theorised in terms of a wider discourse of ‘intimacy’ and central to this has been an emphasis on how understandings, experiences and performances of intimacy are not fixed but instead change over time and space, in quite complex and often contradictory ways (see especially Bernstein 2007; Zelizer 2007).

It is thus surprising that the extant body of work remains focused on the sale of sex by women to men, be it on the street, over the telephone, in a brothel, via escorting, on the internet or through other means. While these debates are exceptionally valuable in furthering conceptualisations of intimacy, gender, sexuality and sexual encounters, notably, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer (LGBTQ) sex work is rarely treated as a matter of substantive concern. This erasure of non-normative identities, performances and embodiments in debates about the sex industry not only restricts the potentialities of the political agency of queer and trans* sex workers but also reinforces the very gender dualisms that many feminist and queer scholars would wish to challenge, i.e. by reproducing heteronormative assumptions that there is a ‘natural’ gender order in which women are sexual objects and men are sexual subjects (Smith 2012). A queer focus, going beyond the hetero-centric gender norm, is important for developing fresh insights into how gender, sex, power, crime, work, migration, space/place, health and intimacy are conceptualised and theorised in the context of commercial sexual encounters.

Queering sex work: theories, practices, methodologies

The overarching aim of this collection is to ‘queer’ debates about the sex industry by enriching the existing body of scholarship in empirical, conceptual and methodological terms. First, we aim to shine a spotlight on queer sex work (using the term ‘queer’ as an adjective) by exploring diverse forms, practices and embodiments of non-hetero/homonormative sex working in order to broaden the empirical focus beyond that of analyses which, whether explicitly or implicitly, are predicated on the imaginaries of the female worker and male client. Although there is undoubtedly an extant literature on men who sell sex to men (see inter alia Aggleton 1999; Altman 2002; Morrison and Whitehead 2007; Whowell 2010; Logan 2010; Mai 2012; Minichiello and Scott 2014), other embodiments and performances of queer sex work remain largely unexplored. The contributions in this collection cover a diversity of empirical case studies – including studies of erotic dance venues, online sex working, pornography and grey sexual economies – whereby sexual services are embodied and exchanged through non-normative practices, such as performances of queer strip tease and the purchasing of sex through online avatars.

Second, we seek to queer sex work (using the term here as a verb) by exposing, interrogating and disrupting the heteronormative gender logics that continue to underpin academic and policy debates about commercial sex. Commercial sex is often assumed to reinforce dominant norms surrounding gender and sexuality and yet, as many of the contributors in this volume explore, it can also be considered ‘queer’ and ‘outside of the (hetero)norm’ (Smith and Laing 2012: 517), whilst also being (re)productive of heteronormative gender logics (Scoular 2004: 348; Pilcher 2012, and this volume). Contributors thus examine the ways in which commercial sex is ‘queered’ by both workers and customers/consumers in commercial sexual interactions. We consider, through a focus on the plethora of spaces in which commercial sexual interactions take place, how spatial and temporal constraints, together with the requests and experiences of customers, the ways in which sex is regulated in law and in practice, and the identities and work roles constructed by sex workers, may affect the ways in which participants in commercial sex can ‘be’, ‘do’ and ‘imagine’ queer performativities and sexualities. Queering sex work not only opens up space to examine the potential fluidity and contestability of gender and sexual power relations in the interactions between sex workers and their customers, but it also provides scope for considering the implications of people’s engagement with (and challenging of) heteronormative discourses more widely.

Third, queer methodologies are a key focus in this collection, indicating how different research methods can be put to the task of questioning normativities (Browne and Nash 2010). Contributors are drawn from a variety of social and political disciplines such as history, geography, sociology, criminology and political science, as well as including contributions from self-identifying queer sex workers, activists and practitioners. Our aim is to bring multidimensional and multidisciplinary voices to debates about the sex industry which moves beyond preoccupations with commercial sex as a moral issue, and attempts to document empirically ‘a rich field of human activities, all of them operating in complex socio-cultural contexts where the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same’ (Agustín 2007: 403). These explorations of queer sex work move away from the male-female, on street-off street, tactile-non-tactile binary considerations of erotic labour and instead address a wide variety of diverse theoretical, empirical and political concerns around the theme of queer sex work.

Structure of the book

The book is broadly split into five substantive parts around the themes of: sex, work and queer interventions; queer embodiments, identities, intersections; new spaces of/and queer sex work; commercial sex and queer communities; and activism and policy. We should immediately acknowledge that attempting to impose order on a ‘queer’ text is in itself paradoxical. As Browne and Nash (2010) note in their collection of queer methodological papers, attempting to place a rigid order or structure on a queer text somewhat defies the idea of ‘queering’ the text, and also imposes artificial boundaries where they may not be needed. Rather, this book attempts to structure the papers around certain themes and meanings which are reflected within and across the five parts, and each part presents a variety of theoretical, methodological and empirical papers in a way that enables chapters to speak to each other rather than being separately ‘categorised’. Our aim, therefore, is to create a space for a multiplicity of voices to reflect upon what it means to ‘be’, ‘think’ and ‘do’ queer in debates about the sex industry.

Sex/work and queer theorising

The first section of the book, on the theme of sex, work and queer interventions, covers a multitude of approaches to what it means to be, practise and theorise ‘queer’. Smith opens the collection with a piece exploring what it might mean to queer the study of global sexual economies. Arguing that it is not enough to ‘add queer and stir’, she suggests that we need to ‘do queer’ in order to reveal, contest and resist the heteronormative gender logics inherent in much scholarship in international political economy.

In her chapter exploring identity, authenticity and laboured performance, Berg suggests that ‘queer’ should be situated as a way of thinking rather than a marker of identity, and that rather than taking queer as an authentic identity, we must think more ‘queerly’ to unsettle the normative scripts of capitalist labour discourse in the context of sex work.

Hester does much to interrogate the critical frameworks positioning sex work as a form of erotic labour within pornographic industries and explores notions of queerness within this. She examines the ideological underpinnings of pornography debates and offers future research ideas and directions to address this, including those centred on more queer readings of sex work.

McNamara, Tortorici and Tovar’s engaging piece reproduces an online conversation about how the authors’ engagement and experiences of selling sex manifest and relate to bodies, performances, scholarship and activism. They unpack the notion of ‘werq’ as well as exploring a range of other issues including the politics of dealing with sex and sexualities in academic work.

Patterson’s chapter contributes an international imaginary of how sex work can be queered. Exploring representations of (queer) sex work in literary works, he argues that sex work should be understood as part of capitalist development rather than as somehow separable from it.

Sex work and non-normative bodies, identities, intersections

The second section of the book broadly focuses on sex work, queer identities and embodiments. Stardust’s chapter explores how erotic labour provides spaces for dialogue, learning and resistance in a multiplicity of forms. She describes the role of sexual labour in destabilising normative understandings of objectification, and the disruption and queering of client expectations by performers. Exploring issues as diverse as ‘straight for pay’, the inversion of gender norms, negotiating boundaries and femmephobia, she concludes by arguing that erotic labour is absolutely and inescapably queer.

Holt’s auto-ethnographic account of professional submission offers insight into the under-researched area of commercial BDSM and considers how this might be understood in relation to existing academic conceptualisations of sex work.

Avenatti and Jones’s chapter discusses and highlights the ‘powerfully positive’ role of sex worker activism, its demand for rights and respect, and its power to heal. They also describe spaces and practices of sex work and BDSM as therapeutic for both clients and sex workers and the broader sex working community, arguing that ‘[q]ueered sex work has the power to create new language for bodily autonomy and consent, and to transcend traditional approaches to working through trauma and toward self-actualization’.

Stryker’s chapter deconstructs normative notions of identity and sex work, and offers a discussion centred on her self-identification as a ‘fat girl’, and the role and performance of complex identities and the self in the context of sex working. She discusses the interlinking of her self, body and politics, arguing that what is considered the ‘“erotic ideal” constructed by the male gaze is not truly the ideal at all’.

Following this, Sanders reflects on findings derived from a large-scale research project on men who buy sex in the UK. Seeking to challenge the perception that older men, and those with disabilities, are asexual and un-gendered, she offers an analysis of how the experiences of these men purchasing sex has potential to destabilise normative narratives of ‘successful ageing’.

Owens’s chapter offers a second analysis of disability and sex work. Owens describes her role within Outsiders and the TLC trust: both organisations work with disabled people on issues of sexuality, and the TLC trust more specifically on sex work. The chapter reflects on sexual stigmas experienced by disabled people and the importance of access to information and support about sex and sexualities where needed.

Sex work and queer geographies

Part III of the book explores the theme of new spaces of/and queer sex work. The chapters within this section take as their focus specific contexts and spaces within which sex and intimacy are bought, sold and exchanged in queer/non-normative ways. Collins’s chapter addresses the neoliberal relations of queer travel, and the potentialities of queer sex work interactions within tourist experiences. Collins’s analysis crucially points to the complexities of queer tourist/sex work intimacies. Highlighting the relations within tourist spaces that might be seen on the one hand as transformative, she also illuminates the potentially ‘exclusionary relations’ within sex work/tourist interactions. These more troubling relations, she suggests, ‘arise out of differently positioned bodies that are racialised, sexualised and differently placed within positions of objectification and service’.

In a similar vein, albeit in a different spatial context, Pilcher’s chapter attempts to question to what extent a lesbian erotic dance venue can transcend normative gender and sexual roles for women. Drawing upon the historical context of this leisure space, together with more contemporary observations, she argues that non-heterosexual erotic leisure spaces are not necessarily ‘queer’ by definition. Rather, in considering embodiment, conceptions of space and the politics of the ‘gaze’, her chapter highlights the tensions around subverting heteronormativity, alongside the potential to read ‘queer moments’ within erotic dance encounters.

Tyler’s chapter similarly speaks to the issues around breaking down the logics of binary thinking in commercial sex work debates. In his analysis of MSM and M$M on a social network, he seeks to trouble the boundaries between the ways in which men ‘advertise’ their bodies online for both personal and work-related intimacies. Tyler argues that these experiences have queered both the social network landscape and the meanings of selling sex. Interestingly, both Tyler’s and Pilcher’s chapters focus on the politics of looking, and who is being seen/sees in commercial sexual encounters. Both authors seek to point out that sex workers can simultaneously experience ‘being’ subjects and objects at the same time, suggesting a more complex conception of the ‘gaze’ that is enabled in specific spaces, than in previous accounts (e.g. Mulvey 1989).

Procter’s chapter examines the online space of Second Life through ‘queer eyes’ in an attempt to understand the ways in which participants in this space engage with, and construct meanings around, sex work – namely exotic dance. She argues that the ‘pseudonymity’ permissible within this space not only ‘troubles the margins’ of boundaries which are predicated upon offline sex work interactions, but it also reveals important insights about the intimate opportunities available to sex workers and clients in online spaces. Her chapter highlights the ways in which interactions on Second Life simultaneously ‘parody and expose’ gender and sexuality norms from ‘real life’.

A commonality between chapters in this part of the book, we argue, is the ways in which they highlight the contestability of sex work spaces and contexts. Indeed, as Massey argues, ‘places do not have single, unique, “identities”; they are full of internal conflicts’, and in this sense, the ‘specificity’ of place is ‘continually reproduced’ over time and through different social relations (Massey 1994: 155). This would suggest that sex work spaces, places and contexts themselves are not ‘erotic’, or indeed ‘queer’ by virtue of their existence but, rather, that it is the moments and interactions within these spaces that can engender meanings that can potentially challenge heteronormative logics. In this sense, the chapters suggest that sex work spaces, both online and ‘off’, are contestable, fluid, and their meanings are actively produced and reproduced by those participating in them at different times and moments.

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