and law-abiding citizen-workers” in their breaking “the link between profit and social
approbation.”
As historian Philippa Levine argues, prostitution has always been seen as
“work’s mirror image, profit without honor.”
Here, I invoke the narrative of tainting
citizenship to describe the ways in which global sex workers mimic liberal citizenship in
its reducing citizenship to the bottom line or moneymaking activity, though with a
deviance: through the use of their private body parts and sexual organs in the public
sphere of work. In the process, they expand the conception of laboring citizen-workers
beyond the conventional script of the dwelling trajectory.
As such theoretical take on sex work treads on fraught terrains in feminist
it needs to be clarified that the following discussion does not adopt a
celebratory position in seeing sex work as voluntarily empowering or subversive, but
only to delineate, within limited terrain and given existing structures, what global sex
workers can do in helping us rethink the notion of citizenship and even expand the
horizon of cosmopolitanism. In this way, I see the current sexual politics of sex work,
borrowing from Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” framework, occupying a “negotiated”
rather than “hegemonic” or “emancipatory” position in social power relations.
“negotiated” position approaches sex work, in Wendy Chapkis’ words, “as a terrain of
struggle, not a fixed field of gender and power positions.”
Previously, certain strands of radical feminist discourse take on a “hegemonic”
position by seeing commodified sex as purely a manifestation of gender domination and
male violence against women’s body. Such discourse, however, not only lacks a critical
negotiation with gender’s complex interworkings with race, class, sexuality, and
geopolitical disparity in the neo-liberal global economy, its accompanied drive towards
anti-trafficking, anti-prostitution, and anti-pornography legislations has unproductively
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Convention