Revising the borders between labour, pleasure and violence: sex-work as a specific kind of informal employment

Abstract

Key debates still rage over how to define and characterise prostitution, a special kind of employment with no real equivalents for comparison in human activity. Much of the more recent interest in it came only during the raging AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s. This article considers the various theoretical approaches to resolving these questions and highlights three traditional approaches in doing this. The first sees the sex-trade as a free, economic choice of women devoid of moral issues. The second, feminist approach sees prostitution as a reflection and response to gender inequality. The final approach is cultural-historical and looks to explain why prostitution has been marginalised in different societies to different extents The author looks to use aspects of all these three approaches in providing a reconstruction of sex-workers’ understanding of their own experience. This study is based on the voluntary side of the sex trade and does not attempt to make conclusions for forced sex trafficking. Based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with women working in lower to middle levels of the sex trade (street prostitution and home-based services), prostitution is conceptualised as a specific, informal but institutionalized type of employment which is marked by the involvement of the body in economic exchange, in other words, the commodification of the body. The body and sexual skills are converted into money without additional capital investments, allowing sex-work to be seen as an easy way of getting money. At the same time, this corporal regime produces and determines the mobile boundaries of this employment within the continuum that exists between pleasure and violence. These experiences, on the one hand, are originally included in sex-work; however, on the other hand, their intensification and extension over the legitimate levels can transform the situation and shift employment into the space of private relations and/or violence. The results can offer a new approach in viewing the sex trade through the prism of the biopolitics of the body.