Paper short abstract:

With the help of ethnographic approaches, my paper examines the prostitution-ID as an identity document that triggers conflict potential in the everyday (work) life of sex workers in Hamburg, Germany, a town which advertises it’s urban spaces „Reeperbahn“ as „the most sinful mile of the world“. This paper is interested in state surveillance, crime and subjectification practices and identity-creating processes and therefore creates knowledge about social orders and normative frames for the individual doing of everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

My paper examines the prostitution-ID in Germany which was initiated in 2017 by the national Prostitute-Protection-Act (ProstSchG). After mandatory registration and a health check-up, sex workers receive an identification document that they must carry with them while working. At this point there are are tensions between state surveillance, crime and subjectification practices and processes of identity formation which are materialized in the ID and can be seen in the everyday lives of sex workers.

The document evokes feelings (including uncertainty, fear, shame) and specific affective affordances, for example when guests pretend to be governement employees to read the ID and thereby put the sex workers under pressure. At this point, it offers further criminal opportunities through the rule-breaking in a profession that is already threatened by blackmailing. Further the document does not guarantee anonymity and discloses nicknames. As it becomes clear, the ID is conflicted on many levels.

I would like to approach this research subject with the help of theoretical perspectives from the Material Cultural Studies and the New Materialism and ethnographic research with sex workers in Hamburg for my Bachelor-Thesis in 2018 and 2019. Both sex workers and social workers ascribe different meanings (from german scholars often called "Dingbedeutsamkeit") to the document and they position it differently in their everyday experiences and practices:

Which empowerment and action potentials are inscribed and materialized? How does it create practices and institutions? Which historical-grown orders of knowledge and discursive frames does it refer to?

With (recent) perspectives of the Actor-Network-Theory and the New Materialism the identity document could be assigned its own capacities for action (agency). I will present a cultural anthropological research design in the context of my contribution.