Introduction
In the literature on prostitution/sex work,1 authors often acknowledge the ‘whore stigma’ as a key factor for sex workers’ position globally. While scholars emphasize the contextual contingency of sex work itself and the need not to take its causes and consequences for granted, stigma often appears as a fixed entity and is not only generally accepted as universal but is also ‘universalized’, meaning that what is assumed to constitute stigma remains unquestionably the same. Authors often assert the existence of stigma, and when researching the topic, they frequently confine their focus to illustrating ‘identity management’ (Goffman 1959) or discussing which conditions and legislative systems have been successful in combating stigma or more likely to contribute to it or its elimination. Despite the ubiquitous position and significance of stigma for sex workers, it is rarely scrutinized rigorously.
In this volume, we break with the traditional ways stigma is approached in prostitution/sex work studies and present contributions that particularly explore how stigma is conditioned by differences in time, place, citizenship, gender, sexuality, class and race. Stigma is about relationships between people and also sets an interpretative frame whereby people understand and react to situations and actions (Immordino and Russo 2015). The aim of this book is to further our understanding of how stigma becomes embodied in sex workers’ lives and thus affects identities and political strategies. The book’s authors unpack the universal assumption of the existence of a sex work stigma to reveal its daily dynamics (structural, institutional and subjective), all of which contribute to the production and reproduction of stigma.
By presenting empirical studies, some of which are theoretically driven, while others trace the paths stigma takes, the authors expand the existing scholarly debate by reconfiguring the concept of stigma. Lois McNay defines ‘reconfiguring’ as a process in which ‘by slightly rearranging the relations existing between elements within a given theoretical constellation, insight might be generated into ways of moving beyond certain overplayed dualisms and exegetical clichés’ (McNay 2000: 5–6). Without denying the impact that stigma has in sex workers’ lives, the authors prefer an approach that slightly ‘rearranges the relations’ (McNay 2000: 5). Our aim with reconfiguring the concept of stigma is to facilitate the further conceptualization of stigma as imbued with contradictions and ambiguities, ultimately transforming stigma into less of a description and more of an analytical tool. We believe that knowing more about the ways it manifests, varies and affects sex workers’ lives is key to mobilizing towards change. The concept of stigma relates to the relationship between social life and the self, and while a stigma is a discrediting attribute in Erving Goffman’s terminology, stigma is thoroughly relational and processual (Link and Phelan 2001; Parker and Aggleton 2003; Hammond and Kingston 2014). This idea is important to our approach and differs from a position where stigma is argued to be universal or that stigma stems from how the act of selling sex dehumanizes those who sell sex (Farley 2006: 126). Relationality is thus key in several ways and is the main analytical focus in this book.
Tracing the paths to knowledge in stigma theory
Any genealogy of stigma theory, whether in the public health sciences or social sciences, begins with Goffman’s classic book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman laid the foundation for an understanding of how some have come to be considered, and treated, differently from ‘normal people’ and how they manage the risk or reality of departing from the norm. Goffman’s work provides the analytical tools to understand how particular kinds of stigma come into being, as well as through which attributes and stereotypes stigma is constituted. His work also provides insight into the relational character of stigma, albeit limited to stigma’s ability to mutually define the stigmatized and the non-stigmatized simultaneously (Goffman 1963).
Goffman delineates three different stigmas: abominations of the body, blemishes of individual character and ‘tribal stigma’, the last concerning race, religion and nationality, among other factors (1963). In social science research, stigma is often used in the sense of blemishes on the character, particularly what Goffman speaks of as ‘conduct stigma’, a stigma that stems from involvement in acts that transgress contemporary cultural norms (Benoit et al. 2020).2 Another crucial delineation Goffman makes is between how stigma singles out people by discrediting them and how those with a characteristic that may discredit them live knowing that they are discreditable. Pre-empting stigma affects how people act and feel and makes them work hard to hide characteristics that might make them vulnerable to others’ condemnation, producing what we often address as shame.
Goffman’s work has had a profound impact on the theorization of deviance and social control; the term ‘stigma’ continues to be key in the study of various marginalized groups (Link and Phelan 2001; LeBel 2008). A review of the stigma literature highlights certain aspects of the concept. For example, the concept is widely applied in health research dealing with the marginalization of people with particular health problems, such as mental illness, addiction, obesity and HIV/AIDS, to explore how stigma becomes a barrier for seeking or receiving necessary health services (Arboleda-Flórez and Stuart 2012; Overstreet et al. 2013; for an overview of stigma’s use, see Scambler 2009). Another strand of stigma research examines the consequences of belonging to a visible minority, for example due to disability or race, where the focus is on stigma management (Green et al. 2005; Crockett 2017).
Most studies in which stigma is conceptualized as a barrier and as an identity to be managed hold that stigma originates from a physical, biological or psychological attribute that is difficult to make disappear. In applying Goffman’s concept of stigma literally, as ‘an attribute’, stigma starts to look static, something which invites a descriptive mode. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (2003) argue that when looking at the whole concept of stigma as Goffman presented it, stigmatization is better expressed as a process whereby people, but also relationships, are devalued. To explore such a process, we must use other methods than when we aim to identify the existence and effect of stigma. Link and Phelan (2001: 367) set out to conceptualize stigma through four distinct components: labelling that leads to (1) negative stereotyping, (2) a separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’, (3) status loss and (4) discrimination. Such a conceptualization allows for subjecting stigma to empirical investigation and for ensuring that labelling in itself is not conflated with stigmatization. Labels in themselves do not necessarily lead to negative stereotypes; most labels do not have those kinds of ramifications (Link and Phelan 2001), and not all undesirable attributes lead to othering and discrimination. As Link and Phelan note (2001: 367), what forms the relationship between these components is how
The literature on stigma typically addresses one or two of these components, such as how negative stereotypes serve as a basis for distinctions between in-groups and out-groups, or how being set apart as ‘the other’ leads to discrimination. Thinking of stigmatization as processual informs this book. Taken as a whole, the book’s authors address all four of Link and Phelan’s components but take the subject further by analysing the relationships between the components and how they rely on various forms of power.
Conceptualizing stigma as relational and processual is how we approach the book’s ambition to reconfigure sex work stigma. In this endeavour, we have sought inspiration from authors who have explicitly addressed how stigma is connected to power. Link and Phelan (2014: 24) argue that stigmatization is all about power and is exercised to keep people ‘down, in or away’. This position appears to treat stigmatization as an intentional strategy, one where certain individuals or groups dominate others. Others have more explicitly addressed stigmatization as a social process whereby hierarchical differences between genders, classes, races and other categories manifest, more than how stigmatization serves as a tool for the powerful (Parker and Aggleton 2003). According to Tyler and Slater (2018: 232), ‘stigma feeds upon, strengthens and reproduces existing inequalities of class, race, gender and sexuality’. In the same vein, Logie et al. (2011) talk of intersecting stigmas that exacerbate pre-existing structural inequities. Stigma, as a relation of power, thus functions in the broader scheme of things, whether as a practice of ‘capital accumulation’ (Tyler and Slater 2018: 727), racial capitalism (Lloyd and Bonds 2018) or maintaining social control of one group over another (Link and Phelan 2001). The study of stigma as such produces knowledge about the ways stigma contributes to creating, moulding and sustaining broader structural processes of exclusion, marginalization and discrimination. This idea is an important background to our take on stigma in this book.
Pescosolido and Martin’s (2015) approach to stigma adds another component to the analysis. They argue that several layers of stigma operate on the micro, meso and macro levels, noting that ‘stigma emanates from many societal and individual systems whose interconnections cannot be divorced from one another. They coexist in a dynamic relationship in which there is an interplay across, for example the media, the community and the individual’ (2015: 101). The authors recognize the interconnectedness and dynamic nature of the processes of stigmatization that occur on different levels. But underlying this definition is an assumption that the interconnections between the different ‘systems’ are aligned with each other, that stigma is something they produce together, one reinforcing the other. As part of our agenda to reconfigure the sex work stigma, we do not assume that different spheres or levels are necessarily in alignment, but instead acknowledge that the interconnections may also produce a disjuncture. Our interest in questioning the predictability of the interconnections originates from the specificities of sex work. Both historical and contemporary studies have shown that an ambiguous relationship exists in how sex work is addressed between different spheres and levels, for example in how a punitive regime for governing sex work can exist simultaneously as tolerance. The prime example is the multifaceted way in which prostitution in 19th-century Europe was addressed, where prostitution was simultaneously criminalized and tolerated, marginalized and placed centre stage (Pedersen 2000; Ystehede and Skilbrei 2017). This example highlights the need for the conceptualization of stigma to be grounded in empirical knowledge about the specificities of stigma’s making, expressions and effects. The book’s authors aim to use sex work as a starting point to contribute to stigma theory.
We previously briefly described the shortcomings of the contemporary use of stigma in sex work studies, particularly the lack of analysis of power. In the following, we provide insight into characteristics that make the concept of stigma worth keeping. More effort is necessary to conceptualize these characteristics as processual and relational, a necessary step if the concept is to lose its descriptive nature and become an analytical tool. Raven Bowen and Vicky Bungay’s definition of stigma expresses the interconnectedness often lacking in others’ portrayal of stigma. They define stigma as ‘a socially constructed, context-specific experience of Othering that devalues one’s identity, social contributions and potentiality in ways that limit how one can interact within ones’ world of socio-structural relationships’ (Bowen and Bungay 2016: 187). They further argue that ‘stigma is doubly felt as it is first experienced through social interactions, and then internally as people process and interpret their encounters’ (Bowen and Bungay 2016: 187). Our book aims to cover the whole range of aspects of stigma’s making and effects that Bowen and Bungay outline. We add that we incorporate a focus on relations that enable the study of stigma as a dynamic process regarding stigma’s origins and manifestation, the actors involved and the outcomes. Key to our thinking, and the background for this book, is that we are interested in contingencies in the origins, operations and consequences of stigma, in order to treat stigma not as a ‘thing’, universal and universalizing, but as relational.
