ABSTRACT
Sex work is a deeply contentious area for many gender equality activists. Some see sex work as a valid form of income generation, therefore international development interventions that engage with sex workers should focus on ensuring that their workers’ rights are protected and upheld. For others, even the term ‘sex work’ is offensive. They see prostitution as sex slavery; a non-negotiable abuse of women’s bodies that international development should seek to abolish. In this chapter, which draws on responses to sex work in Cambodia, the author notes how she has never met a woman who admits to selling sex that is engaged in a ‘gender equality project’ and not a project that is connected to HIV prevention. This is despite the intersecting forms of marginalisation experienced by many (but not all) people who sell sex – whatever their sex at birth, or lived identity – and despite the very particular gendered judgements passed on those who sell sex. She goes on to trace the realities that lie in between these two ideological positions, and demonstrates how female sex workers in Cambodia were, to quote a chapter section heading, ‘battered by the winds of international feminist politics’.
