“They wouldn't get away with it at McDonalds”: Decriminalization, work, and disciplinary power in New Zealand brothels

Abstract

New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2004 with the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act (2003), which sets an explicit intention to prevent exploitation of sex workers and improve their welfare. This has demonstrably improved conditions for sex workers and provides a necessary context for addressing exploitation. However, little research has looked at how this works for brothel‐based sex workers in New Zealand. This paper responds to that gap by examining how brothel operators in New Zealand exercise power and control and how sex workers experience that. The study draws on in‐depth interviews conducted across New Zealand with 33 participants. These include staff from the New Zealand Sex Workers' Collective (2), brothel‐based sex workers (18), operators (8), and sex worker/operators (5). We use a Foucauldian framework and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to examine how disciplinary power informs brothel management, prompting the production of normative discourses of work that destabilize sex workers' safety at work. We conclude that decriminalization nevertheless provides an essential framework by which sex workers are able to resist disciplinary control (W/C 171).

Organizing vulnerability exploring Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability to study organizations

“…Vulnerability through organizations describes how organizations produce vulnerability through exploitation and exclusion (Tyler, 2019, 184) and distribute them unequally between individuals and groups. Some business models are directly based on exploitation (including sexual exploitation) (Weinhold et al., 2023; Whiteman and W. H. Cooper, 2016), and organizations also use violence (Costas & Grey, 2019; Kenny, 2016; Varman & Al‐Amoudi, 2016) to further their goals. But not only organizations involved in (explicit) exploitation and violence produce vulnerability, all organizations produce vulnerability by brokering the division of labor (e.g., by constructing a gendered division of labor between paid and unpaid work, see Benschop et al., 2001 and by producing employment and unemployment as categories, see Salais, 2022), by contracting employment relations (e.g., by defining certain groups as employees and others as freelancers, see Meijerink et al., 2021), by constructing jobs and occupations (Ashcraft, 2013; Healy, Broadbent, and Strachan, 2018) and by organizing working conditions (Yildirim & Eslen‐Ziya, 2021).…”