“Different Strolls, Different Worlds? Gentrification and its Impact on Outdoor Sex Work”

Abstract

Research reveals mixed findings regarding gentrification’s effects on longtime residents and legal small businesses. There is only minimal examination of the ways in which urban redevelopment impacts illicit outdoor marketplaces, and the studies that do rarely employ a comparative analysis or focus on individual perceptions regarding such changes. Using the case of street-based sex work, this study illuminates how workers in the outdoor trade assess changing work conditions and establishes that such evaluations color workers’ decision-making. We draw on interviews with 51 sex workers of color who are familiar with two divergent sex work “strolls” in Washington, DC. Our findings suggest that participants perceive gentrification as a multifaceted phenomenon that reconfigures their work by altering social support, environmental conditions, and competition, changes which ultimately inform where they ply their trade. This research shows that individuals in illicit outdoor markets consider the ramifications of urban redevelopment on their work and make strategic decisions that have implications for their emotional, physical, and financial well-being.

The carceral production of transgender poverty: How racialized gender policing deprives transgender women of housing and safety

“…This article has broader implications for understanding how the legal and governmental classification of poor people’s identities and survival strategies creates poverty and vulnerability. While many studies focus narrowly on anti-homeless (Fisher et al., 2015; Goldfisher, 2019; Herring, 2019; Robinson, 2017), anti-drug (Alexander, 2010; Moore and Elkavich, 2008), or anti-prostitution enforcement (Hail-Jares et al., 2017; Oselin et al., 2020), this study traces the effects of legal regulation of multiple types of survival and income strategies in the lives of a group of participants to show how seemingly race and gender-neutral laws and administrative policies and their enforcement result in race and gender-specific targeting of transgender women.…”

“…In the context of welfare retrenchment and investment in a carceral system response to poverty (Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009), a moral panic around the sex trade, drug use, and homelessness in public space convinced policymakers across the United States to support primarily punitive rather than social welfare responses to visible poverty (Gordon, 2016). This punitive turn has disproportionately targeted queer and trans people of color, whose identities and earning activities are more frequently criminalized (Hail-Jares et al., 2017; Mogul et al., 2011; Oselin et al., 2020; Ritchie, 2017). Yet, queer and trans experiences are often marginalized or excluded from scholarly analyses of the criminalization of poverty and homelessness.…”

It’s Not Just Sex: Relational Dynamics between Street-Based Sex Workers and Their Regular Customers

“…They clearly express their reliance on these business relationships for income stability and for their livelihood. While the extant literature on client selection identifies risk management and safety as primary considerations (Oselin and Cobbina, 2017; Oselin et al, 2020; Sanders and Campbell, 2007), this article additionally shows street-based sex workers also prioritize securing regular customers because of the financial benefits they present. On their end, and in addition to payment, regulars demonstrate loyalty to their preferred providers through tips or gifts, dinners and by pleasing them sexually.…”

“…As with licit businesses, street-based sex workers in this study are acutely aware of competition in the surrounding area (see Oselin et al, 2020), and consider their own substitutability when providing flexible payments or scheduling accommodations (Lee and Cunningham, 2001). They clearly express their reliance on these business relationships for income stability and for their livelihood.…”

Development of the sex industry and the spread of prostitution in advanced European civilization

“…Some individuals solicit in an area alone, others in areas where there are also others selling sex. Respondents noted that peak times for soliciting are usually evenings and mornings, when buyers are going/coming from work, or in the early morning when buyers working night shifts finish work (Oselin et al, 2022).…”