Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a sex workers' union in London to articulate their activism for workers' rights and occupational safety, as a means to reframe illness and injury as effects of stigmatised labour and carceral policing regimes rather than epidemiological risk.

Paper long abstract

Sex work and sex workers are routinely produced within medical and legal regimes as objects of epidemiological risk, the precarious and stigmatising nature of whose labours are appropriated to mobilise discourses of health that consolidate disease as bodily and moral harm, rather than as workers whose labour absorbs specific forms of illness, injury, and bodily exhaustion. Anxieties about population health, in these discourses, reproduce sex workers as requiring containment and policing, or as responsibilised subjects of development tasked with managing risk through compliance with HIV prevention, reproductive health, and hygiene protocols. Regulatory appeals to hygiene and safety in public health therefore function as techniques of governmentality through which sexuality is rendered legible, governable, and punishable under the guise of health protection.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a sex workers’ union in London, this paper examines how sex workers advocate for occupational safety by drawing attention to the forms of bodily harm produced through surveillancing and policing practices. Union workers politicise the connections between occupational safety and sex work, by showing how bureaucratic and governmental anxieties about sexual health belie a larger class and gender ideology invested with the management of working-class bodies through the sanitisation of the public sphere. The paper shows how sex workers' unions attempt to advance alternate ideas of health and workers' autonomy, that draw not from individualised, securitised, and epidemiological notions of health, but remain rooted in ideals of freedom from coercion, carceral regulation, and medicalised surveillance.