Deviant Heterosexuality in Austere Times

Abstract

This chapter explores how sex work is constructed as a mode of deviant heterosexuality in the twenty-first century. It contends that ongoing moral panics over commercial sex do important political work for capitalism by distracting attention from the close entanglements between heteronormativity and economic injustice. The chapter begins by investigating the connections between the criminalization of sex work and the austerity agenda that has defined Britain’s political economy since 2010. It then interrogates the linkages between the politics of sex work and the politics of anti-immigration, arguing that neoliberalism has itself been made thinkable through anti-trafficking discourses that restrict labor freedoms in the name of eradicating unfree labor.