Suchergebnisse

L'articolo discute le politiche sulla prostituzione in Italia dal 1958 ad oggi.

My PhD thesis entitled The Political Economy of Sex Work in Europe' aims at reformulating the most politically relevant aspects of sex work in contemporary Europe in terms of state policy interventions and of main conflicts between groups engaging on the politics of sex work, through a systematic use of materialist tools, in particular French Materialist Feminism (Leonard, Adkins (eds.), 1996). The first step of this theoretical enterprise is the recognition of the uniquely interesting position, both political and epistemological, held by the sex workers' movement in the context of a general sex work regime emerging across different countries: the 'anti-trafficking' regime. Beyond the clear position that 'sex work is work', and its claims for legalisation, this movement offers a variety of original reflections on the specificities of sex work, both in terms of its labour content and its political content. In particular, sex work activists appear to argue that sex work is both sex and work; that, as with the rest of sex, it is first of all a practice of human interaction; and that, centrally, it carries a unique stigma which may correspond to a unique potential resistance. Elaborating on this marginalised knowledge, my contribution furthers an understanding of the specificity of the production of sex - whether it takes place in a work context or not - as a 'focused interaction' (Goffman, 1963) that constitutes a kind of 'factory of the selves' employing 'relational labour'. It also defines the concrete social division relevant to sex work in contemporary Europe, which is one of gender, but also of sexual identity and ethnicity - in other words, of those who are defined as 'abnormals' versus the 'normals'. The thesis overall suggests that, when given theoretical breath, the struggles of sex workers may indicate that a 'class' analysis is necessary to understand the specific relational exploitation that women, LGBT, and ethnicised people are subjected to as abnormals, far beyond the sphere of sex work.

The chapter looks at domestic workers' movements as a telling case of collective action developed by multiply-marginalised social groups, in particular migrant, low-class, racialised, and rural women employed in the sector. The present study focuses on Ecuador and Colombia, exploring the ways in which organisations in both contexts used intersectionality differently, in various aspects of their mobilisation process, in the period between 2010 and 2018. Interestingly, activists in Ecuador appear to develop a complex discourse that articulates the role that gender and class, in addition to race, play in the inequalities that weigh on domestic workers, and yet when they lobby their government to ratify the ILO 'Convention No. 189 on decent work for domestic workers,' they privilege alliances based on class and the promotion of labour rights. On the contrary, in Colombia, activists are able to use their intersectional identities, as Afro-Colombian women domestic workers, to bring into the public sphere a discourse in which gender, race, and class are always present, and they do so by originally articulating a new frame rooted in a feminist analysis of the 'care economy.'

Increasingly, prostitution and other activities in the sex industries have been conceptualised as forms of labour, or at least as income-generating activities. As labour, these activities are exposed to particular risks with respect to health, working conditions, exploitation and stigmatisation. However, research on the actual conditions and circumstances existing in these markets, remains limited. The present article introduces some of the main issues researchers may face when studying quality of work in the sex industry, and it does so by introducing and discussing the six pieces of research published in the Special Section Exploitation and Its Opposite. Researching the quality of working life in the sex industries'. Four main points are discussed as being central to this emerging field of research: methodological challenges, the inclusion of different market segments, consideration of migration issues, and the role of legislative regimes. The authors stress the importance of developing precise comparisons between different types of sex work, of engaging between qualitative and quantitative approaches to quality of work, and finally of looking beyond the industry, comparing sex work to other forms of work.