ABSTRACT
Sex work is a subject of significant contestation across academic disciplines, as well as within legal, medical, moral, feminist, political and socio-cultural discourses. A large body of research exists, but much of this focuses on the sale of sex by women to men and ignores other performances, practices, meanings and embodiments in the contemporary sex industry. A queer agenda is important in order to challenge hetero-centric gender norms and to develop new insights into how gender, sex, power, crime, work, migration, space/place, health and intimacy are understood in the context of commercial sexual encounters.
Queer Sex Work explores what it might mean to ‘be’, ‘do’ and ‘think’ queer(ly) in the study and practice of commercial sex. It brings together a multiplicity of empirical case studies – including erotic dance venues, online sex working, pornography, grey sexual economies, and BSDM – and offers a variety of perspectives from academic scholars, policy practitioners, activists and sex workers themselves. In so doing, the book advances a queer politics of sex work that aims to disrupt heteronormative logics whilst also making space for different voices in academic and political debates about commercial sex.
This unique and multidisciplinary volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of the global sex trade and of gender, sexuality, feminism and queer theory more broadly, as well as policymakers, activists and practitioners interested in the politics and practice of sex work in local, national and international contexts.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |53 pages
Sex, work and queer interventions
part |50 pages
Queer embodiments, identities, intersections
chapter |12 pages
Critical femininities, fluid sexualities and queer temporalities
part |49 pages
New spaces of/and queer sex work
chapter |13 pages
Subverting heteronormativity in a lesbian erotic dance venue?
chapter |13 pages
Troubling the margins between intimacy and anonymity
part |51 pages
Commercial sex and queer communities
chapter |11 pages
Outdoor brothel culture
chapter |16 pages
‘Mates from the pub'
part |55 pages
Activism and policy