Sex Work and Language

Benedict J.L. Rowlett, Rodrigo Borba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040301937
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection brings together established and exciting new voices to shed light on the language of and about sex work, offering an empirically nuanced understanding of commercial sex through language.

While there is burgeoning literature on sex work in the social sciences, there has been little work to date centering it from a linguistic perspective. Chapters make the case for language as central to sex work practices and the transactions of intimacy in the negotiation of services, promotional strategies and the performance of desire. Featuring insights from diverse geographic contexts, the chapters critically reflect on different dimensions of language and sex work, including sex work, gender and desire; online sex work; sex work and race; sex worker advocacy; and the language of victimization and exploitation. The volume illuminates the ways in which commercial sex work is negotiated in embodied linguistic interaction and attendant issues of power, identity, gender, race and desire.

This book systematizes the body of growing knowledge around language and sex work from an interdisciplinary lens. It is key reading for scholars, policymakers and activists in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, as well as fields such as anthropology, sociology, criminology and health and social care.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Speaking of sex work: Setting a research agenda
• 2 ‘Why do you think a woman can’t enjoy sex as much as a man can?’: Discourses of women’s sexual desire, pleasure and agency in an online sex work forum
• 3 The pleasure of pleasing: A corpus-assisted small stories approach to male clients’ affective identity constructions of heterosexual desire in PunterNet reviews
• 4 ‘I’m not a faggot, I’m a man’: Male sex workers doing masculinity talking sex1
• 5 Polyvalent attribution and the discursive construction of Blackwomen’s sexual labor in The Boondocks
• 6 ‘Good evening, you sex-hungry crowd!’: Discursive-corporeal performances and strategies of a Black male sex worker on X/Twitter1
• 7 The narratives she lives by: Identity, intersection and agency in the many roles of a Filipina sex worker in Hong Kong
• 8 Sissy hypno in a trans-affirming register: Shifting orders of pornography online
• 9 Computable desires: Platformed sex work and the datafication of intimacy
• 10 Resisting discrimination against sex work/ers: A critical discourse analysis of comments on YouTube
• 11 Sex workers’ place of enunciation: A materialist discourse analytical approach
• 12 Hyperbole for advocacy: Stereotypical and subversive sex work in Naty Menstrual’s writing
• 13 The dynamics of agency in sex work: Discursive constructions of violence in transnational contexts
• 14 ‘Foreign, illegal prostitutes’ and ‘New Zealand working girls’: Sex workers as villains and victims in media discourse
• 15 ‘I am not a victim of anything’: Minors identified as victims of human trafficking in Italy1
• Index