ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses law's ability to meet seemingly competing demands for protection, made by radical feminists, and for empowerment, by those who advocate sex worker rights. The chapter warns of the dangers of fixed positions and unproductive identity politics, and suggests a constitutive methodology. This suggestion is to radically rethink the relationship between the subject of prostitution and law and to break out of the current aporia of many contemporary politics and legal debates on sex work. It develops the first post-structural account of both the socio-political subject of prostitution and of law. Grounded in a constitutive methodology, The Subject of Prostitution offers a selective genealogy of the subject of prostitution, focusing on the changing constructions of the 'problem of prostitution'. The ways in which prostitution is constituted as an object of governance, in the context of changing forms of power, has implications for prostitution as a social practice.
