Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses frictions in the negotiation of subjectivities and belongings of people from "Eastern Europe" engaged in sex work in Berlin as they navigate living and working as an "Eastern European sex worker" in "the West", and their implications for a postcolonial reading of "Europe".

Paper long abstract:

In debates about sex work and migration in Germany, the "Eastern European prostitute" features prominently as a stereotype for the poor and naïve victim of human trafficking. These debates gained in popularity amidst growing anxieties about migration and disputes over sexual rights and freedoms in recent years, as they also conveniently combine racialized, gendered, sexualized and classist ideas of "Eastern Europe" (in contrast to a more progressive "West") in Germany. While the realities of people from "the East" who are engaged in sex work in Germany are, unsurprisingly, more complex than these stereotypes make them out to be, they are also influenced by these hegemonic discourses about and understandings of sex work and "Eastern-Europeanness". For many of my interlocutors in an ethnographic study on the lived realities of sex workers from "Eastern Europe" in Berlin, experiences of othering, racialization and discrimination in work contexts and everyday life often came in conflict with their own ideas about mobility and belonging in "Europe", which created frictions in their negotiation of subjectivities and identities that both challenged and reinforced a division between "the East" and "the West". In this paper I want to discuss some of these frictions and their implications for the conceptualizations of race, class, sexuality and gender between and beyond "Eastern" and "Western Europe" as well as their significance for an analysis of "Europeanness" through postcolonial theory.