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Working Outside the (Hetero)Norm? Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Sex Work
Nicola J. Smith
University of Birmingham
Mary Laing
Northumbria University
Recent scholarship on sex work has highlighted the diversification of the sex industry
under late capitalism. There is now a wealth of research that interrogates and
documents how sex is sold in a plethora of spaces, through multiple mechanisms and
by a multitude of actors for diverse reasons (see for instance Sanders, 2006; Agustin,
2007; Kotiswaran, 2010; Cavalieri, 2011). By exploring the complexities of
commercial sex in analytical, empirical and normative terms, this literature has done
much to expose and challenge the entrenched polarities such as those between
oppression and liberation, violence and pleasure, and victimhood and agency that
have long underpinned political and philosophical debates surrounding the sale and
purchase of sex. For example, commercial sex has been theorised in terms of a wider
discourse of intimacy and central to this has been an emphasis on how
understandings, experiences and performances of intimacy are not fixed but instead
change over time and space (see especially Bernstein, 2007; Zelizer, 2011). It is thus
surprising that much of this varied scholarship remains focused on the sale of sex by
women to men, be it on the street, over the telephone, in a brothel, via escorting, on
the Internet or through a multiplicity of other means. While these debates are
extremely valuable in terms of their academic merit and often in terms of their policy
relevance, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) sex work is rarely
treated as an object of substantive concern. Although there is undoubtedly an extant
literature on men who sell sex to men (see inter alia Aggleton, 1999; Kaye, 2007;
Morrison and Whitehead, 2007; Padilla, 2007; Kong, 2009; Mai, 2009; Logan, 2010;
Whowell, 2010), other embodiments and performances of LGBTQ sex work remain
largely unexplored.
The overarching aim of this special issue is to shine a spotlight on LGBTQ sex work
and, in so doing, enrich the existing body of scholarship in four specific ways. First,
we hope to contribute to the literature in empirical terms, in particular by self-
consciously broadening the empirical focus beyond that of analyses which, whether
explicitly or implicitly, are predicated on the imaginaries of the female worker and
male client. The contributions to this special issue cover a whole diversity of
empirical case studies including lesbian exotic dance, male street work, transgender
migrant sex work and gay hospitality services that are drawn from a variety of
social and political disciplines such as history, geography, sociology, criminology,
and political science. As such, we aim to bring a multidimensional and
multidisciplinary voice to debates about the sex industry that moves beyond
preoccupations with commercial sex as a moral issue but rather attempts to document
empirically a rich field of human activities, all of them operating in complex socio-
cultural contexts where the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same
(Agustin, 2007: 403).
Second, by exploring sex work through the lens of non-normative sexualities, we wish
to interrogate the complex ways in which sexuality, intimacy and, importantly, sex
itself can be performed within the commercial sexual exchange. Our intention here
is to broaden the multifarious ways in which sex work can be conceptualised, not
least with respect to heteronormativity. For example, in her article Dancing for
Women: Subverting Heteronormativity in a Lesbian Erotic Dance Space?, Katy
Pilcher explores how the performance of erotic dance by women for women
reinforces and reproduces heteronormative prescriptions of femininity even as it
challenges and subverts them. Conversely, in Gay Hospitality as Desiring Labor:
Contextualizing Transnational Sexual Labor, Dana Collins discusses how gay-
identified hosts in Malate are able to negotiate the exclusionary relations of
gentrification and neoliberal gay travel precisely by constituting themselves as active
participants in the production of gay culture. Jody Miller and Andrea Nichols paper,
Identity, Sexuality and Commercial Sex among Sri Lankan Nachchi, provides an
important contribution to the literature on desire and subjectivities in sex work as they
explore the nachchi, who are described to be transgender and homosexual. Miller
and Nichols explore the sexual desire of the nachchi for men, their need to be desired
as men, whist being treated like but not as women. Some of the key themes
explored demonstrating the complexity of commercial sex in this context include
exploitation, violence and sexual desire through nuanced conceptualisations of gender
and sexual encounter.
Third, a key motivation behind the special issue, and a prominent theme to emerge in
many of the papers, is that of exposing invisibilities. This allows for a consideration
of how and why LGBTQ sex work has tended to be rendered invisible in debates
about commercial sex and it also encourages reflection on how current debates
concerning sexuality, inclusion and exclusion might be reframed in the light of
LGBTQ sex working. In The Fractal Queerness of Non-Heteronormative Migrant
Sex Workers in the UK Sex Industry, for instance, Nick Mai notes how the
reproduction of heteronormative understandings of gender relations and identities
serve to obscure the diversity of migrant sex workers experiences and identities,
including those of male and non-heteronormative people. Drawing on in-depth
interviews with male and transgendered people working as migrant workers in
Londons sex industry, Mai discusses the complexity of their life and work
experiences as they seek to navigate the queer, homonormative and heteronormative
worlds that they traverse through migration. Similarly, in Body Issues: The Political
Economy of Male Sex Work, Nicola Smith highlights the crucial contribution that
feminist scholarship on global sexual economies has made to the study of
globalisation and capitalism, but points to continued gaps and silences surrounding
the existence, experiences and status of male and transgender sex workers. She then
offers an example of feminist political economy research on male sex work through
discussion of her qualitative fieldwork with men working as gay escorts in San
Francisco.
Fourth, this special issue offers comment on the impact of formal and informal
regulatory and punitive actions taken by communities and official bodies in areas of
outdoor sex work. In Becki Ross and Rachael Sullivans incisive historical paper
Tracing Lines of Horizontal Hostility: How Sex Workers and Gay Activists Battled
for Space, Voice, and Belonging in Vancouver, 1975-1985 there is a discussion of
the historical decimation of street beats in downtown Vancouver by local anti-
prostitution campaigners. The paper demonstrates the lack of cultural, political and
social capital felt by street-involved sex workers as they were unable to fight back
against the homonomative, masculine and neo-liberal politics at play in a gentrifying
neighbourhood. Conversely in Walking the beat and doing business: exploring
spaces of male sex work and public sex Atkins and Laing explore a space of sex
work which also operates as an area used by men for public sex. They offer a richly
empirical conceptual analysis of how beat spaces are created, exist and dissipate
through embodied peripatetic and sexual practices.
With these four threads running through the special issue, we very much hope that it
will be of interest not only to scholars who are specifically interested in commercial
sex but also to a wider interdisciplinary audience, as the contributions featured
consider the overarching themes of (in)visibilities, regulation, practice, sexualities in
the city, spatial control, inclusion, exclusion, embodiment and sexual citizenship. We
would very much like to thank Sexualities and, in particular, Ken Plummer and
Agnes Skamballis for making this project possible, and special thanks must of
course go both to the contributors themselves and the colleagues who gave up their
valuable time to act as referees for the papers included.
References
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