‘We should tax sex workers to fund subsidies for families’: shifting affective registers and enduring (sexual) norms in the Italian Northern League’s approach to prostitution

Abstract

This paper explores changes in the emotional and affective repertoires mobilized by the Northern League, a longstanding and successful radical right-wing populist party in Italy, to justify its recent prostitution policy proposal. Having dispensed to a large extent with the punitive and fearful rhetoric against migrant prostitution that characterized its previous campaigns, under its new leader the Northern League has been calling for the regulation of prostitution and for its profitable taxation. A façade of knowing authority on the complex issue of prostitution governance is established and asserted by the party leadership and citizens are encouraged to think and feel differently about sex workers, now identified as profitable human capital. The measures proposed, I suggest, far from being non-moralistic and ideologically neutral, as they are presented, reinforce a well-established, emotively appealing and normative dichotomy between potentially dangerous individuals in need of surveillance and the wholesome family, cornerstone of the nation in need of economic assistance to reproduce and thrive.

Sex work and gendered tax imaginaries

“…The few studies that have looked specifically at the taxation of commercial sex have focussed on the attempts made by governments in different contexts to avoid being seen as actively extracting taxes from individuals or businesses operating in the sex industry, because doing so is viewed as legitimising and validating an otherwise stigmatised activity (Remick 2003;Richards 2017). In an effort to expand the understudied role that fiscal policies and practices play in shaping the citizenship of sex workers, my ongoing work in this area has explored the taxation of sex work in Italy (Crowhurst 2019a(Crowhurst , 2019b, and how it compares to policies, practices and their experiences in other European countries (Crowhurst, Chimienti and Oliveira forthcoming). Collectively, this body of work expands scholarship on the composite and rarely homogenous policies, laws and sanctions, their interpretation and implementation, that shape the governance of sex work.…”

“…Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing party the League, advocated in the 2010s to change the Merlin Law and to introduce a regulationist 7 regime that would tax prostitution. For several years, he made the taxation of prostitution a key objective of his political campaigns, claiming that it would bring much-needed funds to the state coffers (Crowhurst 2019b). These examples show that the taxation of prostitution is discussed in public forums in Italy, including in the mainstream media.…”