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.     

#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.     

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.     

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.     

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’.     

'The ravages of permissiveness': sex education and the permissive society

In this article we explore how sex education in schools has become an adversarial political issue. Although sex education has never been a wholly uncontroversial subject, we show that for two decades after the Second World War there was a broad consensus among policy-makers that it offered a solution to public health and social problems, especially venereal disease. From the late 1960s, this consensus came under attack. As part of a wider effort to reverse the changes associated with the 'permissive' society and legislation of the late 1960s, moral traditionalists and pro-family campaigners sought to problematize sex education. They depicted it as morally corrupting and redefined it as a problem rather than a public health solution. Henceforth, the politics of sex education became increasingly polarized and adversarial. We conclude that the fractious debates about sex education in the 1980s and 1990s are a legacy of this reaction against the permissive society.     

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.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

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.     

Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador,Brazil

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’     

‘You just have to be smart’: spatial practices and subjectivity among women in sex work in London,Ontario

Social science research on the relationship between space and sex work, specifically among women in street-based settings, demonstrates the spatialized nature of risk and how different forms of civic and legal governance contribute to their socio-economic marginalization. However, these studies rarely consider the women’s spatial practices and gendered subjectivities beyond the sex trade, which is problematic because sex work is not their singular life activity or the only impetus for their spatial movements through the urban landscape. Using social mapping and interview data from 33 women in sex work in London, Ontario, this article explores how our participants navigate the spaces where they work and live alongside those regarding health care, social services, violence and places they avoid. Findings reveal that the women traverse diverse spaces as they access health services, especially for crisis issues that necessitate travel to hospitals located beyond the inner city. The spaces used to access social services and those they avoid (i.e. to not be emotionally triggered or under police surveillance) overlap significantly, which presents unique challenges for our participants who depend upon these services for their socio-economic survival. The theoretical contributions these data make to the feminist geography literature on gender and space are discussed, particularly with respect to the issues of nomadic subjectivity and the relationality between city spaces and marginalized bodies.     

Providing fun in the ‘world of tourism’: servicing backpackers in Indonesia

Service sector work is a special arena for the formation of gendered subjects because its workers are both service providers and part of the consumed product in the sense that they have to deliver a ‘quality’ product and have the ‘right attitude’ toward customers. Based on repeated qualitative fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with tourism workers in a backpacker tourism enclave in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this article explores the ways in which tourism work and tourism workers are constructed as gendered subjects. Although women and men might have the same work tasks within tourism, they are positioned differently, and it is not unusual for women to be seen as having a hidden agenda that is assumed to involve sex work. Men are constructed as the norm to which women are compared and consequently perceived as deviating from. Between men and women working in tourism and the western backpackers on which tourism workers depend in order to sustain their livelihoods, relations of class, gender and colonial stereotypes come into play. Tourism workers consider themselves to be seen as providers of fun, which means that they are able to meet the needs of the tourists, whatever those needs might be.     

HEALTH CONCERNS OF ‘INVISIBLE’1 CROSS-BORDER DOMESTIC MAIDS IN THAILAND

With the rising number of sex venues along the Thai–Burmese border and the perceived links between migration and the HIV epidemic, the Thai authorities and NGOs have begun concerning themselves with health problems of immigrant workers and seeking effective social welfare programmes for them. However, this paper argues that formal service programmes targeting specific groups may not be enough and notes a need to call attention to officially invisible migrants, particularly domestic maids from Burma who are more vulnerable precisely because they are ‘invisible’. The ‘maid trade’ from Burma to Thailand is statistically invisible firstly because domestic work is not recognized as a formal occupation either by the employers or the employees and therefore, they fail to be registered in census data. Burmese female domestic workers in Thailand are normally recruited through informal channels facilitated by regional trans-national networks that also engage in human smuggling. Domestic workers remain invisible in Thailand also because most of them are live-in and tend to work for one family for lengthy periods of time. They are normally out of reach of labour unions, religious organizations, non-governmental organizations and public health services. The fear of being caught as ‘illegal workers’ by the authorities further hinders their contact with the public. This paper also attributes the migrants’ invisibility to the tradition of ‘domestic servitude’ in Thai society. Using three detailed case studies, the paper demonstrates how the invisibility has contributed to the health vulnerability of these women in their daily lives.     

Virtual youth: non-heterosexual young people's use of the internet to negotiate their identities and socio-sexual relations

This article explores the ways that non-heterosexual young people are negotiating their identities and socio-sexual relations on the internet in the UK. Drawing on the key concepts of embodiment and performativity, and based on in-depth qualitative research with non-heterosexual youth and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth workers, this article investigates the use of social networking websites which have been specifically designed for LGBT users, and the connections between virtual and material spaces in young people's everyday lives. This research reveals that although the internet is an important medium through which new and existing socio-sexual trajectories are being negotiated, there is also a more complex and multi-dimensional relationship between young people's online and offline realities.     

Negotiating between patriarchy and emancipation: rural-to-urban migrant women in Albania

It is essential to explore the role of gender while analysing internal migration in Albania to account for the differing experiences of men and women. Quantitative studies suggest that Albanian internal migration is pioneered by men, with women merely acceding to their wishes. This article addresses the undervalued role of women in the academic discourse concerning migration in Albania. Utilizing ethnographic research techniques, it explores the role of women migrating from rural to urban areas as part of a larger household and examines the coping and negotiating strategies used for survival in the city. Our findings reveal that women actively participate in the rural-to-urban migration process, including the initial decision to migrate and the choice of destination. Women's narratives provide evidence of specific emancipation strategies through which they express themselves and their new ways of living. Women adjust to and challenge their new urban environment through gaining paid employment and expanding their social networks, as well as experience emancipation through daughters and by changing their appearance, achieving varying degrees of personal and social prosperity.     

Heterogeneity and Labour Agency in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This article considers the broad question of how to improve the conditions of workers in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), which relies on predominantly informal activities. While acknowledging that formalization can provide ASGM miners with tenure security and protection of labour rights, it is important to highlight that not all workers are likely to benefit from formalization in the same way, and that decent work ambitions should extend to all workers, regardless of whether or not they are formalized. It is therefore crucial to understand the heterogeneity in the ASGM workforce. This article describes working conditions for different categories of workers based on a survey carried out in the Watsa and Shabunda territories in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It analyses labour agency and shows that workers are diversely integrated in the labour process and may use power resources in various ways. The discussion reflects on ways to consider the heterogeneity in ASGM labour and to push the ASGM agenda beyond formalization.     

Care,pay, love: commodification and the spaces of live-in care

This paper investigates uses of the concept of commodification in contemporary analyses of waged care. Drawing on theoretical work on commodification and discourse-analytical research on private live-in care in Switzerland, I explore how Swiss live-in care questions central discussions in the literature. Scholars have focused on the ways in which care is embroiled within market relations and the adverse effects of commodification on the character and quality of care. The paper outlines the two central discussions, identifies important limitations and explores the ways in which Swiss live-care contests their underlying assumptions. Swiss live-in care exhibits intricate processes of waging elder care. Live-in care services are offered and arranged on agency websites while taking place at elderly persons’ private households. Elder care thus becomes entangled in market relations both in virtual spaces and at home. Furthermore, live-in care workers do not distance themselves from their work but actively seek to improve their conditions of work. In so doing, they complicate the assumption that paying for care corrupts caregiving or turns it into a product for sale. Based on this evidence from Swiss live-in care, I propose that a careful use of commodification might best serve feminist interventions.     

Male clients of Thai transgender sex workers in Europe

Academic approaches to the topic of Thai transgender women (kathoey) working in the sex industry have hitherto typically focused on their sociocultural background and economic motivations. These have relied heavily on feminist theories. Meanwhile, such studies have typically also treated their clients as products of heteropatriarchy or as deviants. This article presents fresh insights into Thai kathoey sex workers' European clients in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium. This is a neglected field in sexual behaviour that involves fetishism and the reality of European men who prefer to buy sex from Thai transgender sex workers. With an anthropological understanding of power relations, the article questions the notion, common in studies of prostitution, that the entire story is one of vile human degradation and violence against transgender sex workers.     

Feeling sexual transgression: subjectivity,bodily experience,and non-normative hetero-erotic practices in women's cross-border sex in Costa Rica

Participating in sexual tourism and cross-border sex, heterosexual Euro-North American women are a targeted social group whereby accusations, such as ‘fucking gringa’, label them as sexual transgressors for violating multiple boundaries of heteronormativity. The complex power dynamics of women's cross-border sex are due to negotiations of race, gender, and class that are played out in specific locales and political economies of desire. Within these dynamics, women are agentive social actors and exert considerable sexual agency in their desires for local men who are positioned unevenly vis-à-vis tourist women's mobilities within erotic markets. Yet women's hetero-erotic sexual practices, which are experienced at the level of the body, cannot be assumed; looking at the lived experiences of women as sexual trangressors in these spaces promises to complicate non-normative heterosexuality and the gendered dynamics of (straight) transnational sex. Using critical ethnography and a performance approach to writing that places subjectivity at the center of the ethnographic record and analysis, this article conveys an ‘insider’ or emic account of women's transnational sex taking place in a Caribbean region of Costa Rica renown for women's sexual and romance tourism. In taking this approach, I aim to show how heterosexuality, hetero-erotic practices, and cross-border sex are not always what they seem and a glimpse into ‘the subjects’ worlds in their words' (Madison, Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage, 174) has implications for theory concerned with the body and performance as fundamental to the social production of sexual transgression.     

Evaluations of sex assessment using weighted traits on incomplete skeletal remains

Several studies have presented a variety of sexually dimorphic traits on the skeleton offering possibilities to score these traits for sex determination. However, few have discussed how fragmentation of skeletons affects the reliability of the results, and how to assess sex attribution based on a variety of methods. In the present study sex was determined for 354 skeletons from the medieval Swedish town Sigtuna, using well‐recognized sexing techniques on the pelvis, skull and femur. The preservation of the skeletons varied markedly, thus affecting possibilities for sex assessments. An attempt was made to evaluate the result of the sex assessment when weighting of different traits with different scales was used. The resulting estimation for each individual was called total mean value A. In addition, a total mean value B that considers unobservable missing traits was estimated. It can be concluded that both weighting and fragmentation affect sex assessments of incomplete skeletons. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.