What kind of work is sex work?: Examining sex work on a continuum of everyday labour practice and lived experience

Sex work has been defined as inherently exploitative. Historic and contemporary debates have reduced sex work to the logic of victimhood, often conflating prostitution with violence and trafficking instead of engaging with economic factors that present sex work as legitimate work - or even a viable alternative to other forms of structural exploitation and social inequalities. In contrast, this PhD research focuses on the nexus of sex / work / sex work, situating sex work on a continuum of everyday labour practice and identifying points of interconnectedness with other work, livelihoods and lived experience.
Economic instability in the United Kingdom - austerity and labour markets affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, costs of living, debt, and the gig economy - make these themes timely. Sex work in its differential forms may increasingly appeal, as both a financial and ontological solution to an already precarious life. My research attends to both online and offline, rural and urban populations.
Driven by the question 'what kind of work is sex work?', I engage with workers as complex subjects, with desires and duties overlapping personal and working lives. An increasing proportion of sex workers in the UK do not make a living exclusively in the sex industry but incorporate sexual labour into a portfolio of occupations. The categories of 'sex worker' and 'non-sex worker' cannot be neatly delineated, and it is recognised that the work of sex work shares attributes with other job roles.
Considering the extent to which subjects feel they were already doing the work of sex work before entering the industry, I ask how contemporary constructions of sex/uality and intimacy are both informed by and formative of sex work. The labour of casual dating apps and social media influencer marketing are starting points, troubling understandings of 'authentic' work, love and sex, as well as limits between the relational and the transactional. Theories of subjectivation play a key role, examining how contemporary financial subjects are formed as sex workers, as opposed to assuming a role or being coerced into the industry.
Sex work research faces a methodological impasse: saturated by empirical and statistical approaches, research often reduces the complex lifeworlds of sex workers to criminal or public health interest. This delegitimises situated knowledges, not to mention humanities and visual arts as productive disciplines in sex work research.
I put forward an innovative case for expanding methods in sex work research through Back and Puwar's (2012) lens of live sociology. Live methods have the capacity to capture and produce affects, reactions, sensory and embodied experience. They align with my intention to facilitate participation and collaboration with sex / workers. Three methods will be developed:
1. Participant-based writing and visual workshops.
2. A collaborative online content platform.
3. Semi-structured interviews with participants.
Workshops offer a generative mode of knowledge production, capturing points at which subjective narratives overlap. Multiple methods of recruitment will form 2-3 focus groups: one of independent sex workers, another of non-sex workers. This factors in sub-groups including client-focused service providers, flexibilised and salaried workers. Initial workshops will be semi-structured, starting with conceptual questions such as 'when does work begin and end?' and setting a writing task. In secondary workshops, photovoice is considered as a qualitative method forming insights into lived experience, inviting consented participants to document their lives through photography and moving image.
I aim for this research to contest social and political discourses which valorise cognitive labour beyond bodies and affects within capitalist production, meanwhile failing to concede exploitative labour practices beyond commercial sex. I also seek to expand interdisciplinary methodologies in sex work research.