Negotiating Sex Work

“Dear higher education, there are sex workers on your campus”: Rendering visible the realities of U.S. college students engaged in sex work.

“…In actuality violence in the sex trade and related industries is usually indicative of power differentials” (p. 1062). As such, much of the discourse and debate about the lives of sex workers rest with questioning if work is truly empowering or inherently exploitative; the agent/victim binary (Showden & Majic, 2014). Throughout history sex workers have often chosen sex work as rejection of being controlled—by rich and powerful people and the church—but more importantly as an attempted rejection of poverty (Roberts, 1992).…”

“…Beyond a simple dislike of a particular person, or thing, stigma is more insidious and works to mark people and populations as disgraceful, and more broadly operates as a form of social control because stigma is inherently relational (Brandon-Friedman, 2017); stigma materializes to beat back the norm breakers, the deviants, to comply with “societal standards.” Within the context of this study, sex workers are marked as socially, morally, and sexually deviant through archaic stereotypes (Grant, 2014), public health hysteria (Showden & Majic, 2014), and sex trafficking conflation/flattening (Weitzer, 2010). These phenomena are made possible when, for example, they are normalized which creates harmful contexts they must maneuver and when they are not disrupted as misinformation (Smith & Freyd, 2014).…”

“…Sexual services is a broad term and can include well-known sex work such as exotic dancing or escorting, however, sex work can also include actions such as phone sex operators, webcam models, and pornography, amateur or otherwise. While there is an abundance of research and writing about sex work broadly (Baratosy & Wendt, 2017; Grant, 2014; Leigh, 2004; Outshoorn, 2005; Roberts, 1992; Showden & Majic, 2014), there is considerably less literature on the experience of college students engaged in sex work, specifically. This gap in the literature is concerning for two reasons: (a) college student sex workers represent an example of students not only with a minoritized identity—in that they must endure exclusionary practices from dominant society because of their sex work—but also a s tigmatized identity.…”