UC Irvine

This dissertation examines sex workers’ political practices, showing how sex workers use informal and formal strategies to combat criminality and stigma. I develop the concept of regulatory liminality to describe valences of discursive power, legal ambiguity, and intersectional power hierarchies that mediate sex workers experiences in the world. Utilizing participant observation and interviews with sex workers and sex worker rights activists in the US, UK, and Australia, as well as textual analysis from academic, legal, and public media on sexworker-led organizations, my research highlights the understudied relationship between discursive practices, advocacy, and human rights in the context of sex work. My dissertation first outlines why an intersectional approach is required to understand sex workers’ political practices. I discuss the issues that many sex workers are organizing for, and some of the practices they use to do so. I also discuss my data collection methods, which include field work in the US, UK and Australia. These field sites represent the three ideal-typical forms of regulation based on these frames: criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization respectively. Next, I discuss how the conflation of human trafficking with sex work stems from the “white slave hysteria,” which perpetuated views of sex workers as either criminals or victims. In Chapter 3, I turn to sex worker-led organizations to analyze the formal strategies sex workers draw upon, resist, or otherwise navigate the overlapping and often incongruent regulatory environments produced by these discursive frames. This includes public education and political advocacy. In Chapter 4, I turn towards their informal strategies such as mutual aid, information sharing and relationship building. Finally, I discuss both the impact of regulatory liminality on organizing, and how organizers are working to reimagine the stakes of organizing in ways that configure abolitionist visions of an anti-carceral world. This project locates sex workers’ organizing in a global lineage of grassroots mobilization from other criminalized and stigmatized communities, including queer, transgender, and civil rights movements.