“The Prostitution Problem”: Claims, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes

The 2020s: The Next Decade for the Archives of Sexual Behavior

“…Under Paul Vasey's leadership, we inaugurated by invitation the Target Article series (Vasey & Zucker, 2016). In 2019, we published six Target Articles (Benoit, Smith, Jansson, Healey, & Magnuson, 2019;Cherkasskaya & Rosario, 2019;Frank, 2019;Grubbs, Perry, Wilt, & Reid, 2019;Leonhardt, Spencer, Butler, & Theobald, 2019;Luoto, Krams, & Rantala, 2019).…”

Intimate others and risky tenants: disentangling the economy of affect shaping women’s migratory projects in Italy

“…effortless female dispositions. Concomitantly, despite the neoliberal urge to commodify everything, including one's 'erotic capital' (Hakim 2011), the stigma on sex workers (see for example Benoit et al 2019, Platt et al 2018) remains particularly 'sticky' (Ahmed 2004, p. 120). This economy of affect, as I show in the next section, informs feminists and sex workers rights activists' debate on the nature, roots and scale of the harm in prostitution, and their views on whether and how states should legislate over this activity.…”

“…This economy of affect, as I show in the next section, informs feminists and sex workers rights activists' debate on the nature, roots and scale of the harm in prostitution, and their views on whether and how states should legislate over this activity. Following Benoit et al (2019), I distinguish the two main positions in this debate based on what they identify as the root of the 'prostitution problem' i.e. gender or social inequality.…”

“…Furthermore, the isolation of sex trafficking from a broader labour exploitation framework (Wijers 2015) and the highest visibility that the former attracts in public policy and discourse compared to the latter, overshadow concerns for the difficult conditions under which many migrant women, for example, perform care work (see for example Anderson 2000, O'Connell Davidson and Anderson 2007, Garofalo Geymonat et al 2017. Conversely, scholars and activists heralding the social inequality perspective foreground precarity as a framework to conceptualise sex workers and other workers (Benoit et al 2019) as subjects ordinarily at risk of being worn out (Berlant 2006, p. 23) by predatory neoliberal economies and exclusionary mobility regimes.…”

“…The transgression of the (fictitious) boundaries safeguarding the sphere of intimacy from the commodification of its constitutive acts and attachments (hereinafter the market/intimacy binary) appears to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. However, in contexts increasingly characterised by restrictive mobility regimes (Vuolajärvi 2018) and repressive prostitution policies within and across national borders (Benoit et al 2019) the intersection of work, intimacy and migration gives rise to different hierarchies of visibility and policy concern for the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which women perform their labour. Following Constable's invitation to cast 'the pairing of commodification and intimacy' as the main topic of analysis (Constable 2009, p. 58), and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, in this article I discuss the relationship between work and intimacy in the lives of migrant women for whom the commodification of intimate acts and attachments by and large encapsulates their opportunities to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies.…”