A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Sex 'Work' - of /courses - Victoria ...

324 Feminism & Psychology 11(3)
and public service attitude towards, prostitution is seen as a contributing factor in
the current push for legislation to decriminalize prostitution in New Zealand
(White, 1998). A government report on public submissions to the Prostitution
Reform Bill 2000 is due in May 2001.
Sex work in New Zealand covers a wide range of activities including street
work, ship work, parlour work, escort work, working independently, mistressing,
peep show work, stripping, telephone work and topless dancing (Bell et al.,
1998). An umbrella term that covers all aspects of sex work is the ‘sex industry’.
For various reasons it is difficult to assess accurately the numbers working in the
industry. However, it is likely that more than 10,000 people from a population of
3.8 million are involved in New Zealand’s sex industry, most being escort or
parlour workers (Dayan and Healy, 1996; Woods, 1996). Furthermore, in comparison
with the total population of New Zealand, it is estimated that women and
people describing themselves as transgendered are over-represented as workers
in the industry, whereas men are under-represented as workers but overrepresented
as clients. The demographic profile of workers relative to clients is
taken as evidence of the secondary and marginalized social status of women and
people from sexual minority groups.
LIBERATORY APPROACHES
Sex work is an area that has attracted substantial debate from a variety of
approaches. Views of prostitution as crime, disease, sin and perversity play a role
in everyday understandings of sex work as well as in legal responses to it.
However, in this article we wish to align ourselves with approaches that aim
to be in some way feminist or liberatory. Unfortunately, even within what are
broadly feminist approaches, there is little consensus about how to understand
sex work and little agreement about the best course of action for improving the
lives of people involved in sex work. Unlike much past work (for example,
Jeffreys, 1995; Jordan, 1991), we resist a single, coherent definition of what sex
work means. Rather, we aim to document how the different concerns raised by
feminists about choice, work, violence and so on, are used in sex workers’
accounts of their experiences. In doing this we want to highlight the multiple and
contradictory meanings of sex work. By embracing rather than resisting multiple
feminist perspectives we aim to show how different understandings of sex are
used productively by participants to both endorse and resist the social, cultural
and historical meanings that define the work they do.
At the risk of polarizing different feminist approaches, they can be categorized
as roughly falling into two camps. In one camp, the radical feminist and Marxist
feminist approaches are against prostitution, viewing it as essentially wrong. The
radical feminist perspective on sex work is that it is about coercion and sexual
subordination. In this view all prostitution is deviant – an act of sexual violence;
a form of abuse against women (see Jeffreys, 1995, 1997). The Marxist feminist