Stigma is an occupational hazard for sex workers and their customers throughout the world. They routinely face prejudice, marginalization, and punitive treatment by social institutions, the authorities, and the wider public. This book offers groundbreaking research on key dimensions of stigmatization in various countries, and it also addresses the preconditions for reducing sex work stigma. A major contribution to our understanding of this crucial impediment to the health and safety of those who are involved in sexual commerce.
Ronald Weitzer, Professor, George Washington University, USA
Questioning the universalised nature of whore stigma, this volume provides insights from sex workers across the globe. From Germany to Japan, Ethiopia to Nevada, what is experienced as stigma in different social and legal practices is scrutinized and further theorised. The book challenges conventional ways of thinking about stigma, making a significant contribution to the literature.
Teela Sanders, Director of Research and Professor of Criminology at the Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, UK
Reconfiguring Stigma in Studies of Sex for Sale
Reconfiguring Stigma in Studies of Sex for Sale is about the production and effects of stigma in sex work or prostitution with contributions from four continents and different disciplines that taken together explore how such stigma is conditioned by differences in time, place, citizenship, gender, sexuality, class and race.
Stigma is about relationships between people and also sets an interpretative frame whereby people understand and react to situations and actions, and the book is developed and organized to investigate this from various angles. It presents empirical studies that build on and expand the scholarship on stigma and sex work. This means that it contributes to a more complex understanding of stigma in sex work studies. Further, by using the example of sex work to explore how we can best understand the production and consequences of stigma, the book makes a contribution that is relevant for all scholars who work on stigma and stigmatization.
The book is intended for academic audiences interested in sex work or prostitution, on the one hand, and stigmatization, on the other. It is also intended for students in a broad range of disciplines, as well as for practitioners and activists who encounter or work with stigmatization or stigmatized populations.
Jeanett Bjnness is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Center for Alcohol and Drug Research at, Aarhus University. Her main research includes work on prostitution and sugardating, and aspects of identity, gender and class related to the exchange of sexual services, as well as young peoples identity strategies and use of medicine and drugs to cope and perform in the educational system.
Lorraine Nencel is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has done research on sex work in different continents and is an engaged scholar aiming to work together with sex-worker-led organizations to produce research that support them in their struggles for change. Her book Ethnography and Prostitution in Peru (Pluto Press 2001) and the article Invisible mobilities: stigma, immobilities, and female sex workers mundane socio-legal negotiations of Dhakas urban space (with H. J. Shewley et al.) in Mobilities (2020) give an idea as to the in-depth understandings that can be produced when using participatory, engaged methodology.
May-Len Skilbrei is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research interests are mobility, gender and sexuality. She has done empirical studies on subjectivities in and policy developments on prostitution and human trafficking, and has together with Charlotta Holmstrm written a monograph and several articles and chapters on policy development on commercial sex in the Nordic countries.
Interdisciplinary Studies in Sex for Sale
Interdisciplinary Studies in Sex for Sale is a new and exciting series emphasising innovative work on the complexities of sex for sale, its practices, the policies designed to regulate it and their effects. It covers both recent and historical developments with an aim to explore multidisciplinary and international perspectives, expand theoretical approaches, and analyse matters which are the subject of controversy and debate in this field.
We welcome submissions of single and co-authored books, as well as edited collections that address sex for sale, its practices and regulation, including those with a focus on: comparative analysis; multi-scalar approaches; methodological perspectives; cultural and economic contexts; and the policies concerned with the regulation of sex for sale.
This series emerges from, and intends to expand the work of the European Concerted Research COST Action IS1209 Comparing European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance (ProsPol), a European network funded under Horizon 2020 (www.prospol.eu).
Isabel Crowhurst is Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex, UK, and coordinator (Chair) of ProsPol. Her research lies at the intersection of sociology, criminology, and critical social policy and centres on the regulation, social control, and lived experiences of commercial sex practices and of intimacy. She has researched and published on the regulation of commercial sex and of prostitution-related migrations of women in contemporary Europe. She has good editorial experience having co-edited four special issues of academic journals.
Rebecca Pates, Professor of Political Theory at Leipzig University, Germany, is (co-)director of a number of grants for research projects on the micro-political regulation of prostitution and trafficking funded by the EU and the German Research Council. These research projects combined grounded theory with discourse analysis. She works on theories of the state, political anthropology and theories of policing. Besides publications on the regulation of sex work in Germany, she has edited a volume on the social construction of German ethnicities and is currently working on a monograph on Policing in East Germany.
May-Len Skilbrei is Professor in Criminology at the University of Oslo, NO, and Vice Chair of Prospol. She works within the fields of criminology, gender studies and sociology of law, and does research on the formulation and implementation of legislation and welfare policies on prostitution nationally and regionally (the Nordic region) as well as on womens narratives of human trafficking. She has published broadly on prostitution and trafficking internationally. She is also an experienced editor, with four edited special issues to her name.
Understanding Sex for Sale
Meanings and Moralities of Sexual Commerce
Edited by May-Len Skilbrei and Marlene Spanger
Women Who Buy Sex
Converging Sexualities?
Sarah Kingston, Natalie Hammond and Scarlett Redman
Sex Work and Human Dignity
Law, Politics and Discourse
Stewart Cunningham
Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution
Contested Engagements in Africa, the Americas and Europe
Isabel Crowhurst, Susan Dewey and Chimaraoke Izugbara
