Drawing on more than fifty interviews in both the US and the Netherlands, Wendy Chapkis captures the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labor and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work. Her expansive analytic perspective encompasses both a serious examination of international prostitution policy as well as hands-on accounts of contemporary commercial sexual practices. Scholarly, but never simply academic, this book is explicitly grounded in a concern for how competing political discourses work concretely in the world--to frame policy and define perceptions of AIDS, to mobilize women into opposing camps, to silence some agendas and to promote others.

This interdisciplinary work identifies a series of key issues in discourses on sexuality - essentialism versus construction, gender and sexuality, concepts of identity, Foucault's notion of discourse, and Butler's theory of gender performance.

Drawing on more than fifty interviews in both the US and the Netherlands, Wendy Chapkis captures the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labor and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work. Her expansive analytic perspective encompasses both a serious examination of international prostitution policy as well as hands-on accounts of contemporary commercial sexual practices. Scholarly, but never simply academic, this book is explicitly grounded in a concern for how competing political discourses work concretely in the world--to frame policy and define perceptions of AIDS, to mobilize women into opposing camps, to silence some agendas and to promote others.

Acts of Desire is a study of theatrical depictions of illicit female sexuality, from seduction and prostitution to bigamy and adultery, from the beginning of the nineteenth century through to the 1930s.

Sex Acts is not about "sex" per se, but rather about the sexual urge and how it affects our relationships with other people. God is mad -- he thinks four angels botched the job when they were earlier assigned to design the human race. In particular, God is not happy about how sexual relationships have evolved. But before the angels make recommendations on how to redesign man (and woman), they review what has happened to sex and romance on earth over the past 50 years or so. Interspersed with the "angel" scenes are "human" scenes that comment on or illustrate the conversation that has just taken place between the angels. These "earthly" scenes range in tone from satirical or funny to poignant or sad.The script contains no explicit sex or nudity, but it does contain adult language.

Winner of the Alex Award “Mike Muñoz Is a Holden Caulfield for a New Millennium--a '10th-generation peasant with a Mexican last name, raised by a single mom on an Indian reservation' . . . Evison, as in his previous four novels, has a light touch and humorously guides the reader, this time through the minefield that is working-class America.” --The New York Times Book Review For Mike Muñoz, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew--he’s smart enough to know that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how? He’s not qualified for much of anything. He has no particular talents, although he is stellar at handling a lawn mower and wielding clipping shears. But now that career seems to be behind him. So what’s next for Mike Muñoz? In this funny, biting, touching, and ultimately inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man determined to achieve the American dream of happiness and prosperity--who just so happens to find himself along the way.

Like a prism, prostitution dynamics reflect and magnify pervasive social patterns. These essays examine those patterns both inside and outside the context of explicit sex commerce. The author elaborates a cross-cultural critique of the categories "prostitute" and "prostitution" as constructed in science, policy and society. At every level of analysis, terms and social categories prove to be slippery, consequential and reflective of an underlying political logic that subordinates women to men. Key to that logic is the whore stigma, an official and traditional mechanism of social control inextricable from issues as diverse as migration, health care, sexual autonomy, employment and freedom of speech.