Prostitution,variegated homes,and the practice of unhomely life in China

This paper studies a group of female sex workers and their ambivalent experiences of home in Dongguan, China’s so-called sin city, before the local government technically cracked down on the city’s sex industry in 2014. It has two objectives. First, we explore these workers’ life journey: spatially from their rural hometown to Dongguan, socially from domestic migrants to sex workers, and subjectively from poor persons to extravagant spenders. Through this journey-based perspective, we show that the departure from one home opens a door to another home, but the door to the sex industry engulfs our respondents into a perpetual condition of unhomely life. Second, we analyze sex workers’ practices of (un)homely life in various spaces of working (sauna), dwelling (rented apartment), and consumption (shopping center) in Dongguan and their imagination of a new home. We argue that home is a liminal space of ambivalent experiences that revolve around dichotomous distinctions between privacy and publicity, friendship and segregation, marginalization and belonging. This paper contributes to the critical geographies of home by incorporating these ambivalent experiences of home into sex workers’ life journey of leaving and making home in the context of China.     

Making links between sex work,gender and victimisation: the politics and pedagogies of John Schools

This article will explore the links between sex work, gender and victimisation. It will draw on the literature on victims and victimology, as well as the literature on sex work, to explore the ways in which sex work, gender and victimisation are presented at John Schools. These are court diversion educational programmes that teach those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions and are currently operating in parts of the USA, Canada, the UK and South Korea. Focusing on a case study of a John School in England, it shows how the pedagogies of the John School are inherently political and structured by the local and extra-local contexts in which it is situated. It also demonstrates the small but significant influence of radical feminist ideas and tropes in the John School and the ways in which the John School presents victimisation relationally as male clients causing hidden harms to victims, most notably residents and female sex workers. Here, the active construction of both the victim and offender identity is critically reflected on.     

#Follow: exploring the role of social media in the online construction of male sex worker lives in Dublin,Ireland

This article draws from qualitative interviews with 18 South American male sex workers in Dublin, exploring how their use of the gym and new social media has created alternative spaces for the conduct of commercial sex. The interviews reveal how sex workers alternatively use escort specific sites in conjunction with mainstream dating apps like Grindr, offering greater flexibility and control over how they are self-defined within the sex industry. These male sex workers become known for their presence in gyms and clubs within the small gay community offering potential clients a real-time embodied interaction. Social media, like Instagram, offered the men in this study a further platform to share part of a choreographed online world with thousands of followers presenting new economic opportunities. The men trade access to their bodies and to their taste in designer commodities and lifestyle to interact with followers who can financially contribute to dictate the format of the photos available for private or public consumption.     

Conceptualisation of home among Russian-speaking women engaged in commercial sex in Finland

This article explores how Russian-speaking women engaged in commercial sex in Finland understand home in relation to their experience of mobility and engagement in commercial sex. As it examines the mobility of those engaged in commercial sex, it moves away from trafficking or forced migration, and focuses on everyday experiences of home, ownership and self-care. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic field work conducted in NGOs and commercial sex venues in Finland. It shows how by investing in private property, the women use their earnings from commercial sex to create their own spaces of comfort and personal pleasure, within the context of mobility, and how the inability to secure a material dwelling makes their sense of home more transient and unstable.     

DAUGHTER DISCRIMINATION AND FUTURE SEX RATIO AT BIRTH IN INDIA

This paper examines recent trends in sex ratio at birth in all the major states of India, based on three rounds of the National Family Health Survey. It finds evidence of an increase in the ratio, particularly at the second-order birth among women having a first daughter in many states in the northwestern region of the country. Also, there are signs of daughter aversion emerging in Odisha, an eastern state. Based on parity progression ratios and the trend in sex selection, an attempt is made to estimate the peak of sex ratio at birth in India. With moderate intensification in sex selection in the northwestern region, sex ratio at birth is expected to reach a peak of 117–119 males per 100 females around the period 2021–2026. If, in addition, sex selection spreads further in the southeastern region, the sex ratio at birth in India could even increase to a level of 124.     

Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry

Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of female migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their aspiration to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities, legitimising women's subjection to men, are both reproduced and challenged. The evidence informing this article shows that a minority of women are coerced into the sex industry. There is a direct link between the adherence to essentialist gender/sexual roles and the recourse to violence and exploitation, because migrants' prolonged involvement in the sex industry coincides with the adherence to more cosmopolitan gender/sexual roles, translating into less authoritarian and violent discourses and practices. Hegemonic understandings of migrants' involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By failing to engage with the meanings that migrants working in the sex industry ascribe to their working and personal lives, the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ enforces forms of solidarity and support that appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to ‘rescue’.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalisation (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.     

Collaborating With Sex Workers in Oral History

It took several decades for sex workers to become true speakers,rather than testifiers to the speech of others. Tensions understandablyremain about sharing authority with oral historians. This articlereflects on attempts to share authority in setting up, funding,organizing, and publishing from a UK sex work project. It questionswhether commitment to share authority compromises scholarshipand theoretical development, and how an oral historian's roleis affected by a parallel advocacy role. It explores the formationand boundaries of collaborative relationships and briefly raisesthe issue of crossing legal boundaries in less orthodox projectwork and implications for ethical permissions.     

Gender performances as spatial acts: (fe)male Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark

The objective of this article is to investigate how Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark understand normative heterosexuality and femininity/masculinity as they are reproduced in the Danish sex industry. To do so I analyse the ways that gender plays a part in sex work and the ways in which sex work plays a significant role in how Thai migrant sex workers understand their gendered subject positions in the spaces away from their sex work. Whether Thai migrant sex workers become intelligible gendered subjects depends on different spaces. Based on two case stories I focus on the space of domesticity, the space of sexual consumption and the quasi-public space of leisure.     

The gentrification of progressive red-light districts and new moral geographies: the case of Amsterdam and Zurich

Even though there is a long tradition of red-light districts (RLD) being concentrated within the city centre, gentrification policies in many European cities now aim at spatially dispersing the sex market (and its workers) to the fringes of the city. Moving RLDs out of the city centre (or transforming them into more-upscale entertainment provision) calls into question the physical place allotted to sex work in our cities, as well as the moral geography behind these decisions. This article examines urban regeneration processes in two particular European cities – Amsterdam and Zurich – both cities with a long history of progressive drug and sex-work policies where sex work has been part of the visible urban fabric. In the article we look at urban policies and the legal framework, as well as at moral reasoning and discourses around the legitimacy of moving sex-workers away from city centres. We argue that in both cities moral arguments play an important role in the legitimization of the transformation of the RLD which contributes to a new race and gender order that stigmatises sex-workers as a group as if they were all victims of trafficking.     

论1950年代高等学校“向工农开门”的方针

新中国成立后中国共产党在教育领域提出的"向工农开门"方针,主要是高等学校"向工农开门"。中国共产党主要采取了两项强力措施——创办中国人民大学和普遍举办工农速成中学贯彻实施这一方针。1955年后,这一方针一度改变为强调培养工农知识分子以业余教育为主。1957年反右派斗争后,中国共产党又重新强调高等学校"向工农开门"。这一方针对于培养新中国第一代新型工农知识分子发挥了积极作用,但也存在着教育质量难以得到保证、不公平、对知识分子不信任、教条主义色彩浓厚等消极因素。     

Digitalising sex commerce and sex work: a comparative analysis of French,Greek and Slovenian websites

The aim of this article is to explore the complexity of the online sex trade and work by analysing sexuality-related commercial websites, with reference to three European states, France, Greece and Slovenia. The article compares websites in each specific sociocultural context, in order to provide insights into the various types of networks and services that emerge, and to explore how they operate, how they communicate and how sex is being merchandised. We have conducted a two-tier analysis: The first part discusses results of a quantitative macro-analysis exploring 149 websites, while the second part is a micro-analysis analysing the visualisation of egocentric network of three selected websites. The focus is on understanding how gender relations develop in digital environment and how within cyberspace sectorial and national divides are dealt with. While there is evidence to suggest that in some sectors the Internet has opened avenues for sex workers to work independently of the control networks, there are also many forms of exploitation that arise from new media. We observe that sex commerce online is not particularly attentive to the agency of sex workers but is, to the contrary, oriented to provide opportunities and a forum for businessmen and clients.     

A brief and improper geography of queerspaces and sexpublics in Austin,Texas

This article offers ethnographic and autoethnographic vignettes from my research on cultures of public sex in Austin, Texas. It also tracks some of the ways my own racialization as a black queer man shaped the research project. My approach, which includes an experimental – ‘reparative’ – textual style, offers several interlocking registers of analysis. I bring together my informants' nostalgic remembrances of public sex in Austin; the legal and media circulation of queer sex in general, and public sex in particular, as specifically ‘public’ problems requiring surveillance, administration, and management; the impacts of HIV/AIDS; and the rise of the Internet as a means to connect. In this way, I not only aim to archive sites of desire and their transformation, but to also archive the everyday and intimate affects that animate, make sense of, and give meaning to queerspaces and sexpublics in Austin as elsewhere. In its eclectic mixes of voices and styles, as well as reality and fiction, my ethnography does not simply describe material geographies (men have sex in parks and hook up online) or linear timelines (first there was public sex and then there was AIDS), rather, gesturing as it does toward a psychic geography of intensities, remembrances, and longings, it tries to conjure an expansive affective archive into brief life.     

The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

HEALTH OF HOME-BASED SEX WORKERS AND THEIR CHILDREN IN RURAL ANDHRA PRADESH,INDIA

This study uses secondary data from 2006 to assess the physical and mental health of rural, home-based sex workers and their young children in rural Andhra Pradesh state of India. The analyses of survey and clinical data show a high level of morbidity amongst sex worker women and their children. Women show high levels of nutritional deficiencies, anaemia, weight loss and hospitalisation. Women's mental health is particularly serious, with 92 per cent being depressed and 57 per cent having attempted suicide. The majority have experienced domestic and work-related violence, including rape. Clinical assessments of sex workers’ children show that most have received vaccinations, but almost half have parasites, dental problems and nutritional deficiencies. Both the physical and mental health of sex worker mothers are associated with the health of their children. Therefore, health interventions focusing on sex worker mothers have the potential to improve the health of their children.     

Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

Special Characteristics of China's Interprovincial Migration

This paper examines interprovincial migration in the People's Republic of China (PRC) during 1982–87 when China was going through economic restructuring. Chinese migration patterns bear some resemblances as well as dissimilarities with those generally observed in Western societies. In China, the age-specific migration rate does not vary much until the preretirement stage. Return to places of origin is obviously the most plausible explanation of Chinese migration patterns. In addition, a clear-cut gender gap exists, higher than that imagined in Western societies. Chinese women appear far behind Chinese men in their propensity to migrate, and the determinants of migration are quite different for Chinese women and Chinese men.     

Female Icons,Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China

This article examines the construction of female subjectivity in emulation campaign materials of early Maoist China. Through critical examination of ‘nüjie diyi’ (the first female) model workers, I argue that Maoist proletarian subjectivity reflects a situated agency produced through empowerment and salvationist impulses. As the first women to engage in traditionally male professions like tractor driving, ‘nüjie diyi’ models can be read as objects of CCP policies and ideology. At the same time, however, their public presence challenged gendered conceptualisations of workplace, technological competence and proletarian identity. Moreover, their close ties to Soviet experts located these women within a geopolitical structure that occasioned alternative sites of female agency. As icons of socialist China and representatives of state‐sponsored feminism, ‘diyi’ women embodied historical progress and social change. Through these women multiple contending subjectivities emerged which simultaneously promised and delimited national feminist rhetoric and agency.