Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship of negotiation between the city and a female, migrant sex worker as the traditional red-light area becomes diluted into an expansive and unfamiliar urban city space.

Paper long abstract:

Women, within the gendered organization of sex work, are situated as passive subjects under a dominant sexuality. The act of selling sexual services relies upon patriarchal, socially constructed notions of gender, sexuality and heteronormativity where only the female body can be prostituted to a male one.

There are several factors that push women to move out of a familiar place and migrate to a new city space. The lack of information, in terms of the kinds or opportunities in a new place makes women workers vulnerable to being under paid and exploited. This results in women looking for supplementary economic support leading them to sex work.

The space of the female migrant sex worker is disappearing and blurring into an unfamiliar urban city space. An attitude of indifference on the part of policy makers and urban planners has resulted in an effective and systematic 'othering' of those who inhabit these spaces.

This experience of the migrant, female sex worker is often essentialized and almost routinely forgotten. Therefore, there is a need to trace and explore women's narratives of citizenship as practitioners of an illegal trade within a borrowed third world city space.

The acceptance of 'prostitution' as a normative category for theorizing labour depends on how it can be constructed as sex 'work' within an already existing market space.

This paper explores the relationship of negotiation between the city and a female, migrant sex worker as the traditional red-light area becomes diluted into an expansive urban city space.