ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceeding chapters of this book. The 'prostitute' subject, a body exchanging sexual services in return for payment, has no inherent, fixed meaning but rather is, signified differently in different discourses. The fact that the law is already playing a part in constructing social spaces and norms of contemporary sex work makes appeals to it as a neutral arbiter all the more problematic. It changes the questions one ask of law, moving away from formalist accounts of what law says to consider and what law does. It acts, alongside other discourses and practices, to constitute, regulate and authorise the spaces, norms and subjects of sex work. The book on the subject of prostitution and law is not an end point but the beginning of a more critical approach that inspires more work which looks beyond the binary of illegal/legal to the complexities of commercial sex and its regulation.
