ACPO

This book would not have been possible without the guidance, input, and support of numerous individuals. First, I thank Nicola Smith, Adrienne Robert, and Juanita Elias for inviting me to publish as part of this series, and prompting my confidence in this work. I would like to thank those who have contributed to the development of my ideas—and my development as a researcher—for the...

It is a cold winter’s day, and my fellow conference-goers and I are bundled in the din of a buzzing cafeteria. Alice, a retired sex worker, a fork poised diagonally in her hand, locks her gaze on mine. I had just asked the group—postgraduates and early career researchers—what had led them to study sex work, the subject of our conference. Because, Alice responded,...

The project of livability is fundamentally one of counter-normalization. Sex work is a nonconformity—a confounding excretion of the prevailing moral, political, and economic frameworks of our times. As I argue elsewhere (Kallock 2017), it represents a movement of the self that is not aligned with prevailing norms of sexuality. Sex work is an abnormative subject formation:...

Sex work is an abnormative undertaking, a means of deploying bodies that is antithetical to sexual norms—and the dominant interests vested therein—that have prevailed for over a century. This chapter charts the historical development of sex-work policy, discourse, and services in the UK by way of delineating the discursive frames and specific policy formations they engendered....

As the previous chapter demonstrates, UK sex-work policies are largely organized around a crime and disorder agenda, with a marginal emphasis on public health, and a growing preoccupation with compulsory rehabilitation. These approaches undermine critical liberatory efforts to contest the exclusion and assimilation of sex workers, and to flex the normative horizon for new forms of livelihood and...

The previous chapter shows how institutional trends, structures, and directives constrain the framing practices of frontline support projects by procedurally shaping how they set their budgets and priorities, who they work with among the frontline bureaucracy, how they measure efficacy, and how much wriggle room they have in designing and delivering services. In this chapter, I consider how...

This book asks whether livability is being deployed at the front lines and what is gained from its deployment. The preceding chapters have addressed this by analyzing the political and institutional context of social services for sex workers, and the practices of empowerment that projects assemble within these constraints, which tend to militate against the deployment of livability. In this...

This book opened with a statement from a retired sex worker, Alice: Sex work, she said, is where everything falls down. My investigation of the front lines has illustrated the truth of this claim. The participating practitioners, all of whom cited extensive experience working with men and women of the commercial sex sector, testified to a broad and diverse range of perspectives on...

Sara M. Kallock received her PhD in politics from the University of Manchester, UK, in 2015. She resides in Massachusetts and currently works as an adjunct professor at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. She is an active organizer with the Massachusetts Sex Work Ally Network (MASWAN) and the Democratic...

This series brings together scholarship from leading and emerging scholars working on the intersections between gender and/or sexuality in political economy. It seeks to move beyond the “blindness” of International Political Economy to feminist, gender, trans*, queer, and masculinity studies in order to more fully capture the complex and contested transformations associated with...