Legal Ambiguity as a Site of Power and Resistance: Sex Work and the Police in Córdoba-Argentina

Abstract

This paper analyzes legal ambiguity as a site of power and resistance; in particular it looks at the experiences of organized sex workers in Córdoba-Argentina in their encounter with police discretion. This focus is currently relevant in light of the rapid expansion in the vague and ambiguous local norms being used to govern large populations. Legal ambiguity can be seen as a site of power. The existing literature on police discretion has tended to focus particularly on the amount of freedom police officers should have in deciding how and whether to enforce the law. This paper engages in the less proliferous, but essential, discussion on the role of law in creating new opportunities for arbitrariness and oppression. Moreover, legal ambiguity is also a site of resistance. Social actors are not passive recipients of top-down policies and that same ambiguity may, for some, become an opportunity to struggle for better conditions. In that sense, the experience of sex workers in Córdoba-Argentina reveals the kind of strategic tactics being used to deal with the abusive practices of the police. The last section of this paper will describe the series of events that prompted a new shift in relations between sex workers and the police as a consequence of a neo-abolitionist wave.