ABSTRACT
This chapter brings intersectional theory into conversation with relational psychoanalytic thought to examine how the interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender shape and sustain the commercial sexual exploitation of women, and how contemporary psychoanalytic theory can both deepen this analysis and shed light on antecedents to entry into prostitution, barriers to exiting prostitution, and considerations for psychotherapy for women with prostitution histories. Sherene Razack (1998) argues that prostitution secures a white, bourgeois social order by marking the bodies of racialized and poor women as degenerate and available to absorb male violence. This chapter builds on Razack’s work to re-center racialized and poor women in prostitution discourse, by interrogating the phenomenon of prostitution through a psychoanalytically informed intersectional lens. The author begins with a review of feminist debates on prostitution, then examines how structural oppression interacts with social projective-introjective processes and psychological trauma to script multiply marginalized women for prostitution in the white imagination, lay the psychological groundwork for exploitation, and obscure the violence of the commercial sex trade. She illustrates the implications of this framework through a case analysis and concludes with recommendations for an embodied, trauma-informed approach to psychoanalytic psychotherapy with women who have prostitution histories.
