The Idea of Sex Work

Focusing on the UK case, this essay explores how ideas and political practices around sex as work took root in a particular national space and shifted over time. Sex work helped to alter the political and social perception of sex traders, repudiating their marginality and positioning them in the mainstream of ordinary working lives. Beginning in the 1970s, political activists aligned the idea of sex as work with a defense of female practitioners as “ordinary” women doing ordinary women’s work. Sex work offered substantial rhetorical advantages for rights activists, who linked a work paradigm to practical demands for criminal justice reform and social and health initiatives. At the same time, the idea of sex as work provoked challenges inside and outside the ranks of sex traders. Antiviolence campaigners disputed that prostitution was a “job like any other” and competed with sex work projects for state resources and recognition. The discourse of sex work also occasioned some resistance within the ranks of sex traders, revealing disparate views about identity politics, the state and the market, and even what sex and work meant.