ABSTRACT
With the conflation of sex work and sex trafficking has emerged the narrative that criminalizing participants in the sex trades can abate sex trafficking; this belief has been enacted through policing the most visible spaces of the industry. The conflation of sex work with sex trafficking has produced an emerging consensus that trafficking can be abated by criminalizing participants in the most visible spaces of the sex industry. These regulations in the US have produced uneven geographies of inclusion and exclusion, which disproportionately affect queer and trans sex workers of color. The physical suppression of sex work propagated the use of digital platforms, which grant workers more agency in navigating their experiences both on and offline. However, the SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act)-FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) threaten these platforms by holding them accountable for any sex work-related content. By framing SESTA-FOSTA as an extension of previous regulations that hyper-police queer and racialized individuals, this chapter explores how the legislation reconfigures the virtual and physical geographies that workers occupy, as well as perpetuates geographies of exclusion by erasing spaces for knowledge sharing and community building. The chapter concludes by speculating on the transformative potential of the sex workers’ rights-based movements to manifest more equitable and just futurities.
