In December 2014, despite the Supreme Court of Canada finding Canada's prostitution laws unconstitutional, the Conservative government passed a bill criminalizing the buying of sex and the advertisement of sex for sale. Sex work has a long history as a hot-button topic, and it continues to remain newsworthy throughout the country. This public discussion in some contexts has privileged certain lobbyists and so-called advocates, disregarding or distorting the voices of sex workers themselves. This territory is starkly heteronormative, reinforcing gendered stereotypes and naturalizing certain types of heterosexual behaviour while ignoring a spectrum of other realities. By analysizing depictions of sex work published for 2013 in the London Free Press, a politically centre-right newspaper printed in a midsized Canadian city, this paper provides analysis of articles about sex work in the local-regional context of London, Ontario (Canada). Exposing a Foucauldian rarefaction of discourse, the analysis works to unveil ideological underpinnings, fleshing out a distorted gendered discourse.

We are in the midst of a zeitgeist where women continue the fight back against patriarchal systems, misogynist institutions, and toxic masculinities that sanction exploitation and perpetration of various forms of gendered violence. While there continue to be reactionary responses from the usual crowd (e.g. men's rights movement), social and public media continue to sensationalize. Some corporations and organizations have responded by examining oppressive practices and policies, or purging problematic male employees and higher-ups. Gender-budgeting and gender-mainstreaming in public policy aim to reduce inequality by redistributing institutional privileges towards women and away from men. Legislation is passed and government initiatives funded to provide state protection to "good" women and "innocent" girls despite the continued reduction of supports in other sectors. Men are framed appositionally as oppressors and perpetrators in need of policing, regulation, and re-education (Martin 1998). Under these paradigms, certain feminist groups and organizations vie for recognition and resources as they advocate, mobilizing public support often by resorting to competitive victimization, using selective statistics, and only validating certain voices. The need to address the subjugation of disempowered women is not in debate here. Yet female-centred policies and discourses perpetuate a culture of dismissal that further disempowers minority groups. Despite the influence of critical gender perspectives on the feminist movement as well as academia, gender is still a synonym for white woman. When any issue such as sexual violence includes victims of all genders, regardless of to what degree, its framing as a "female issue" designates a social context in which "people are reduced to the merely figural: rhetorical tropes and discursive levers… that pre-empt the very possibility of certain bodies, identities and lives" (Namaste 2000).Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and bell hooks (1981), among other feminists of color, have helped shape the social sciences by calling out how a singular and exclusive focus on the oppression of women replicates colonial discourses that silence marginal and dissenting voices. The concept of intersectionality helped illustrate how black women do not have the same experiences as white women nor black men, both groups who had established activist organizations. As a person occupies many social locations, the intersection of these cumulates into an experience greater than the sum of its parts. These standpoints make politics based on one identity inadequate as they ignore other forms of oppression. Some of these axes include race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, gender identity/expression/conformity, relationship, ability, body type/size, and age (cf. Fraser 1995;Mohanty 2003;Osborne 2013). Expanding on this is Patricia Hill Collins' (1990) matrix of domination which looks at the overall structure of power in society and attempts to move beyond black and white thinking, accounting for shades of gray, nu...

This paper is a reflection on an ethnographic moment that occurred as I sought the narratives of male sex workers specific to London, Ontario, a mid-sized Canadian city. Here an informant effectively queered my inadvertent erasure of men-who-sell-sex-to-women during the initial phases of fieldwork. In order to understand what happened, I explore the important role of reflexivity to negotiate productive misunderstandings that occurred and to illuminate the assumptions I made. To provide a contextualized account of the phenomenon of male sex work ultimately requires that I move beyond homonormative (or any normative) pre/conceptualizations avoiding and acknowledging the re/production of essentialized categories.

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