ABSTRACT
An overview of the geographies of sex work in the urban West begins to stress that the location of prostitution in specific sites is no historic accident or mere consequence of supply and demand economics. Work on the geographies of resistance, as the excellent collection by Pile and Keith demonstrates, is now well-established in geographers’ discussions of power relations, identities and cultural politics. Rejecting notions that power can only be wielded by the powerful, much of the work seeks to document that if the power to own and occupy space is everywhere then it can potentially be resisted everywhere. While prostitutes adopt various tactics while working to minimise risks of violence, more generally it has been noted that the stigma and inferiority attributed to being a prostitute forces many to conceal their occupation at different times and in specific places.
