Gilda's Current Sex Worker/Trafficking Reading List
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and 'Immorality'
By Jessica R. Pliley
Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and 'immoral' sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. By situating anti-vice politics in their broader historical contexts, Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950 sheds fresh light on the initiatives of various actors, organizations and institutions which have previously been treated primarily within national and regional boundaries. Looking at anti-vice policy from both social and cultural historical perspectives, it illuminates the centrality of regulating vice in imperial and national modernization projects. The contributors argue that vice and vice regulation constitute an ideal topic for global history, because they bridge the gap between discourse and practice, and state and civil society.
Mobile Orientations
AN INTIMATE AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF MIGRATION, SEX WORK, AND HUMANITARIAN BORDERS
by NICOLA MAI
Despite continued public and legislative concern about sex trafficking across international borders, the actual lives of the individuals involved—and, more importantly, the decisions that led them to sex work—are too often overlooked. With Mobile Orientations, Nicola Mai shows that, far from being victims of a system beyond their control, many contemporary sex workers choose their profession as a means to forge a path toward fulfillment.
Using a bold blend of personal narrative and autoethnography, Mai provides intimate portrayals of sex workers from sites including the Balkans, the Maghreb, and West Africa who decided to sell sex as the means to achieve a better life. Mai explores the contrast between how migrants understand themselves and their work and how humanitarian and governmental agencies conceal their stories, often unwittingly, by addressing them all as helpless victims. The culmination of two decades of research, Mobile Orientations sheds new light on the desires and ambitions of migrant sex workers across the world.
Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom Paperback – August 6, 2018
by Elizabeth Bernstein
Brokered Subjects digs deep into the accepted narratives of sex trafficking to reveal the troubling assumptions that have shaped both right- and left-wing agendas around sexual violence. Drawing on years of in-depth fieldwork, Elizabeth Bernstein sheds light not only on trafficking but also on the broader structures that meld the ostensible pursuit of liberation with contemporary techniques of power. Rather than any meaningful commitment to the safety of sex workers, Bernstein argues, what lies behind our current vision of trafficking victims is a transnational mix of putatively humanitarian militaristic interventions, feel-good capitalism, and what she terms carceral feminism: a feminism compatible with police batons.
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights
by Molly Smith, Juno Mac
Juno Mac is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM), a sex worker–led collective with branches in London, Leeds and Glasgow.
Molly Smith is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM). She is also involved with SCOT-PEP, a sex worker–led charity based in Edinburgh, which is working to decriminalise sex work in Scotland. She has written articles on sex work policy for Guardian and New Republic.
“Revolting Prostitutes is a book I have been waiting for. It is uniquely fit to address the destructive divisions that exist among feminists concerning prostitution. Rejecting the equally unacceptable alternatives of condemnation and glorification of sex work, the authors provide a powerful account of the work itself, the issues it raises, the institutional policy that shape it, all the while demonstrating that sex workers struggles are crucial to any movement for social justice. Well researched, beautifully written, Revolting Prostitutes should be widely read, especially, but not only, by feminists.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch
“With fine, lucid discourse, Juno Mac and Molly Smith decline to engage in the typical back and forth that drones on between the would-be saviors, the scolds, and the glorifiers to go to the heart of the matter—sex work as labor, with a work force ready to speak their minds and fight for their rights. They avoid easy answers and ask the reader to rethink sex work.”
—Susie Bright, author of Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
“Smith and Mac are sharply honest about the emotional, social and political realities of sex work in all its forms and geographies, eschewing pearl-clutching or cheerleading for a laser-guided honesty and frankness about what can improve the lives and experiences of sex workers around the globe, regardless of social class. Revolting Prostitutes is key to understanding how important the rights of sex workers are, and what is at stake when policy is misguided or clouded in sentimentality and gut-feeling over straight evidence. A must-read for politicians, policy makers, and anyone keen to understand the realities of modern sex work.”
—Dawn Foster, author of Lean Out
Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom 1st ed. 2015 Edition
by Julia O'Connell Davidson
Providing a unique critical perspective to debates on slavery, this book brings the literature on transatlantic slavery into dialogue with research on informal sector labour, child labour, migration, debt, prisoners, and sex work in the contemporary world in order to challenge popular and policy discourse on modern slavery.
Children in the Global Sex Trade
by Julia O'Connell Davidson
This compelling new book explores the complexities of the global child sex industry, but without falling into cliche and melodrama. Julia O'Connell Davidson draws attention to the multitude of ways in which children become implicated in the sex trade, and the devastating global political and economic inequalities that underpin their involvement. She sensitively unpicks the relationship between different aspects of the sexual exploitation of children, including trafficking, prostitution and pornography, at the same time challenging popular conceptions of childhood and sexuality.
This thought-provoking book will be of interest to general readers, and to students taking a range of courses, such as gender studies and childhood studies, and courses on sexuality and globalisation.
Prostitution, Power and Freedom
by Julia O'Connell Davidson
Prostitution, Power and Freedom brings new insights to the ongoing debate among scholars, activists, and others on the controversial subject of prostitution. Sociologist Julia O'Connell Davidson's concise, accessibly-written study is based on wide research from various corners of the world. The study employs a range of theoretical analyses and argues against simplistic explanations of the prostitution phenomenon, showing it to be a complex relationship where economics, power relations, gender, age, class, and "choice" intersect.
The author has conducted an impressive amount of research in nine countries, including conversations with male and female sex tourists, adult and child prostitutes, procurers, and clients. Through her research, O'Connell Davidson demonstrates the complexity of prostitution, arguing that it is not simply an effect of male oppression and violence or insatiable sexual needs, nor is it an unproblematic economic encounter. The book provides a sophisticated explanation of the economic and political inequalities underlying prostitution, but also shows that while prostitution necessarily implies certain freedoms for the clients, the amount of freedom experienced by individual prostititutes varies greatly.
This highly accessible book will be of great interest to those in gender and women's studies, sexuality and cultural studies, the sociology of work and organizations, and social policy. General readers will also appreciate having new ways of thinking about this age-old social phenomenon.
Julia O'Connell Davidson is Lecturer in Sociology, University of Leicester.
Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914
by Paula Bartley
Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 is the first comprehensive overview of attempts to eradicate prostitution from English society, including discussion of early attempts at reform and prevention through to the campaigns of the social purists.
Prostitution looks in depth at the various reform institutions which were set up to house prostitutes, analysing the motives of the reformers as well as daily life within these penitentiaries.
This indispensable book reveals:
* reformers' attitudes towards prostitutes and prostitution * daily life inside reform institutions
* attempts at moral education
* developments in moral health theories
* influence of eugenics
* attempts at suppressing prostitution.
[Many current “sex trafficking” organizations still follow this model, they are rehabilitation centers, reform programs, that put people criminalized by police and society to work for their businesses. They are always temporary services/programs and the most they ever offer is temporary housing which only has a few beds, an application process (you can be denied for being pregnant, having children, not being a citizen etc), they always have wait lists similar to many homeless shelters/organizations.]
Prostitution and Victorian society
by Judith R. Walkowitz
The state regulation of prostitution, as established under the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, and the successful campaign for the repeal of the Acts, provide the framework for this study of alliances between prostitutes and feminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police. Prostitution and Victorian Society makes a major contribution to women's history, working-class history, and the social history of medicine and politics. It demonstrates how feminists and others mobilized over sexual questions, how public discourse on prostitution redefined sexuality in the late nineteenth century, and how the state helped to recast definitions of social deviance.
This is an excellent book when it is discussing lower class women reactions to dominance by men and Middle Class Victorian attitudes toward the lower classes. The author makes the point that prostitution was often a job of short duration for women who would presumably move on to other things; marriage, working class occupations, domestic help. It gets dull and dissertation like when discussing the doings of the various parties arrayed against each other over the Contagious Disease Act, which sought to regulate venereal disease amongst prostitutes. I wish it could be chopped up in two big sections. In any case, chapters 1, 2, 8, 10 would suffice for the first view. Needless to say, there is no prurient interest in this book of social history on the treatment of lower class women.
Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve (Cass Series--Cold War History,) 1st Edition
by Helen J. Self
This is an examination, from a feminist historian's standpoint, of the background to the present system of regulating prostitution in Britain - which is generally admitted to be not only unjust and discriminatory, but ineffective even in achieving its stated aims. Concentrating on the 1950s, and especially on the Wolfenden Report and the 1959 Street Offences Act, it is a thorough exposure of the sexual double standard and general misogynist assumptions underlying legislation relating to prostitution. In addition to the detailed analysis of the 1950s legislation and the background to it, there is an exposition of the subsequent workings of the Act, and of attempts to amend or repeal it.