enjoyed by native, educated, and white First World sex workers. Bandana Pattanaik
argues in Transnational Prostitution that the vast trajectories of prostitution make it
difficult “to arrive at neat theories.” In fact, “Powerful stories often confuse us because
they are not homogenous.”
What is important to note here is that even this disparity
among sex workers has not resulted in the less privileged declaring their absolute victim
status and the futility of the project of sex workers’ rights; to the contrary, they demand
more attention, more rights and more protections to fulfill their needs as rightful human
beings. Thus, while a great number of global sex workers do not join the trade because
they want to explore sex with strangers, the very notion of “sex workers’ rights” signifies
that no woman should feel shame or fear in turning to sex for money.
In this chapter, I look at how the hidden exploitation of women’s body and
suppressed sexual expressions in the day-to-day bourgeois society are revealed openly in
the underground world of sex work. In this seemingly pathological space, however, the
conceptualized subordinate victims, global sex workers, are demanding and asserting
their rights as (non-existent) “citizens” in protecting themselves as legitimate workers.
As an occupation inherently rooted in “travel” (e.g. the needed “mobility” in search of
clientele and in order to dodge state authority), global sex workers can be seen as a group
of unofficial traveling agents who carry a precarious status of citizenship, but who also
seek to insinuate themselves into “citizenship” through their demand of a citizen’s very
right to work. While in the previous chapter I address how undocumented domestic and
sweatshop workers transgress the “political” dimension of the dwelling trajectory by re-
scripting the proper ways of citizen participation through the imaginary of tactical
citizenship, here I argue that global sex workers further transgress the “economic”
dimension of the dwelling trajectory by reconfiguring the conventional notion of “honest
5
Convention