“Estamos de pie y en lucha”/“We are standing and fighting”

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the use of empowerment approaches to help reduce health-related vulnerabilities and violence among female sex workers has increasingly informed global health efforts directed at HIV/STD prevention. The empowerment approach to sex worker health rejects both abolitionist and narrowly conceived clinical approaches in favor of strategies that promote commercial sex as valid work, strengthen sex workers' agency, reinforce female sexual autonomy, and support rights-based framing. A significant outcome of the empowerment approach to integrating health, social, and legal strategies has been the creation of numerous sex worker associations and NGOs, which advocate for collective mobilization and community-based HIV/STD prevention programs among sex workers. Despite numerous studies examining the v profession or income-generating strategy that adult women in various stages of their lives perform, the lack of research and theorization about these aspects of female sex workers' lives, I suggest, has prevented a broader research and programmatic response both to common risks such as HIV/STDs and violence, and to work-related health problems and occupational conditions that older sex workers may consider more important in their dayto-day lives. My research shows that a "structural approach" to sex work, which highlights the underlying social, historical, political, and economic forces that encourage and foster the economic exploitation, stigmatization, and negative health outcomes of women (and men) who sell sex, would benefit from adding a feminist anthropological perspective on aging. In this view, aging is a critical social structural inequality that society uses to devalue women's status and which women often experience as stigmatizing and/or shameful. In Costa Rica, where recent reporting has suggested an increase in the number of older women in the local sex industry, studying women's experiences of and responses to growing old in the sex trade reveals not only the longterm impacts of neoliberal reform polices, but also how gendered discourses about aging, increasing familial caregiving responsibilities, and growing inequality and economic pressure, together, conspire to limit older women sex workers' employment opportunities and put them at greater risk of violence, discrimination, psychological distress, sexual assault, substance abuse, poverty, and HIV/STDs.

I'm a 45‐year‐old woman in the body of an 80‐year‐old: The multiple losses of living and aging in the shadow of prostitution

“…The participants were purposefully selected to obtain the widest possible variation of respondents among Arab AWIP (Patton, 2015). The inclusion criteria were women older than 40, in accordance with other research on aging and prostitution (Hao et al., 2014; Pomales, 2015), self‐identified as part of an Arab community, and engaged in prostitution. At the time of the study, eight participants were still actively involved in prostitution to various degrees.…”

“…To date, there is no single agreed‐upon definition of aging women in prostitution (AWIP). Various ages between 35 and 45 have been estimated as the starting point of aging in prostitution (Hao et al., 2014; Pomales, 2015). While this age range may be considered young in other populations, women in prostitution may experience accelerated, premature physical and mental aging resulting from a precarious life and cumulative disadvantage (Otutubikey Izugbara, 2005).…”