Producing the Acceptable Sex Worker considers how sex work is produced in news media narratives, a site where much of the general public draws its understanding of the industry in the absence of lived interaction with it. Taking New Zealand as a case study, this book considers an emerging discourse of acceptability for some sex workers, primarily those who do low-volume indoor work. Their acceptability is established in comparison with other kinds of sex workers, resulting in a redistribution but not a reduction of stigma. The conditions attached to acceptability reflect persistent anxieties aboutsex work: workers who are acceptable must give the impression that the sexual labour of the job is enjoyable and virtually indistinguishable from their personal life, eliding the work involved. Unacceptable workers have existing marginalisations magnified by their association with the industry, with migrant sex workers produced as devious or exploited, and transgender women’s involvement with the industry used to deny them the right to public space. The conditions attached to acceptability reveal how neoliberal discourses of choice, desire, authenticity, and personal responsibility inform the formation of sex work in the public eye.

Sex Work Matters brings together sex workers, scholars and activists to present pioneering essays on the economics and sociology of sex work. From insights by sex workers on how they handle money, intimate relationships and daily harassment by the police, to the experience of male and transgender sex work, this fascinating and original book offers new theoretical frameworks for understanding the sex industry. The result is a vital new contribution to sex-worker rights that explores the topic in new ways, especially its cultural, economic and political dimensions. Readers weary of the sensational and often salacious treatment of the sex industry in the media and literature will find Sex Work Matters refreshing.

This book examines the ways that brothels are managed under decriminalisation in New Zealand. New Zealand decriminalised sex work in 2003 with the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act, making it the first country to do so. Decriminalisation situates brothels as ‘businesses like any other’ and creates a legislative platform for better working conditions for sex workers. Nevertheless, we have limited understanding of how brothels are managed in New Zealand. Drawing on interviews with brothel operators and sex workers, this book explores how the law is understood and implemented, how brothel operators position their businesses, and how they seek legitimacy in a historically stigmatised sector. It also examines the rules and norms by which operators manage their businesses and the possibilities for sex workers to consent to commercial sexual services in the context of neoliberal norms of work and of managers who expect them to be professionalised, responsibilised and productive.

This book provides a contemporary collection of key works that chart new and ongoing terrain on student sex work. It brings together experienced researchers, activists, practitioners, early career researchers and those with lived experience of doing sex work in the university setting from across the globe. The book addresses three core areas: Activism, Ideology and Exclusion; Motivations and Experiences; and University Policy, Practice and Service Delivery. This collection represents significant theoretical, methodological and policy and practice contributions within sex work studies. These new perspectives contribute to our existing knowledge, introduce new directions for scholarship and prompt new and exciting questions about how higher education students’ participation in sex work can be researched, understood and responded to in an ethical, non-stigmatising approach. The book will be of interest to students, researchers and service providers and given the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters, the book has a cross-disciplinary appeal.

New Zealand’s relatively recent decriminalisation of sex work and its unusual success in combatting COVID-19 have both attracted international media interest. This accessibly written book uses the lens of news media coverage to consider the pandemic’s impacts on both sex workers and public perceptions of the industry. Analysing the stigmatisation of sex work in both short- and long-term contexts, the book addresses the impacts of intersectional oppressions or marginalisations on sex workers, and the ways sex work advocacy relates to other social justice movements. It unpicks how New Zealand’s decriminalisation approach functions under stress, offering valuable information for advocates, activists and scholars.

The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality, and Culture is an intersectional, diverse, and comprehensive collection essential for students and researchers examining the intersection of sexuality and culture. The book seeks to reflect established theories while anticipating future developments within gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. A range of international contributors, including leaders in their field, provide insights into dominant and marginalised subjects. Comprising over 30 chapters, the volume is comprised into five thematic parts: Identifying, Embodying, Making, Doing, and Resisting. Topics explored include homonormativity, poetry, video games, menstruation, fatness, disability, sex toys, sex work, BDSM, dating apps, body modifications, and politics and activism. This is an important and unique collection aimed at scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners across cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.

The New Feminist Literary Studies presents sixteen essays by leading and emerging scholars that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today. The book is divided into three sections. This first section , 'Frontiers', contains essays on issues and phenomena that may be considered, if not new, then newly and sometimes uneasily prominent in the public eye: transfeminism, the sexual violence highlighted by #MeToo, Black motherhood, migration, sex worker rights, and celebrity feminism. Essays in the second section, 'Fields', specifically intervene into long-constituted or relatively new academic fields and areas of theory: disability studies, eco-theory, queer studies, and Marxist feminism. Finally, the third section, 'Forms', is dedicated to literary genres and tackles novels of domesticity, feminist dystopias, young adult fiction, feminist manuals and manifestos, memoir, and poetry. Together these essays provide new interventions into the thinking and theorising of contemporary feminism.