A Marxist-feminist approach to improving sex worker vulnerability

The project will explore the subjective experiences of vulnerability of UK sex workers with a view to understanding how these experiences are shaped by capitalist relations, and to assessing how Marxist-feminist theoretical insights can inform effective legal and policy reforms identified as desirable by sex workers themselves. The student will undertake a socio-legal analysis, through the lens of Marxist-feminist theory, of how capitalist social relations shape sex workers' vulnerability, and in order to understand how their self-conceptualisation aligns them with the experiences of other non-standard workers. The project will build on existing studies in the fields of sex work and labour law, highlighting the need for embedding legal and policy considerations about sex work firmly within the sphere of work. As sex workers' vulnerability stems from a legal environment that forces workers into unsafe working conditions (Graham, 2017), it will be argued that incorporation under mainstream labour law offers legitimacy, empowerment and protection (Van der Meulen, 2012; Lopes, 2005). Less prevalent in the literature is a critical perspective that believes in the legitimacy of sex work but recognises that the vulnerability of sex workers is symptomatic of wider capitalist failures, meaning incorporation into the formal economy is of limited practical benefit (Cruz, 2013). The research will build upon this perspective by asking how sex workers' subjective experiences are constitutive of capitalism-induced precarity to create detailed accounts supporting the Marxist-feminist understanding of capitalism as the framework within which relations of oppression, including those that shape the lives of sex workers, operate (Holstrom, 2020). Specifically, the research will develop Cruz's conceptualisation of capitalist relations of (re)production existing on a continuum of labour unfreedom (2018, p.72). By involving sex workers directly in this endeavour, the research will ensure that the more radical suggestions for structural change recommended by Marxist-feminist theorists (see Fudge, 2014; Cruz, 2013; and Lindio-McGovern, 2020 for examples) receive greater recognition but are identified as useful by sex workers' themselves to increase their potential for informing effective policy reform. The project will include an ethnographic dimension (subject to the contingencies of covid19) as well as engaging with scholarly and policy literature. The first 18 months will be spent (in addition to research training) in reviewing the literature, refining the research questions and building relationships with relevant charities and organisations in Bristol so that the observation work can be carried out towards the end of year 2. In adopting a Marxist-feminist approach to empirical sex work research, the research will make important academic contribution to a perspective that has only been explored theoretically thus far. It will have a strong conceptual impact by allowing for substantiated critical engagement with the 'liberal' sex work literature, helping to reframe the debate to ensure that experiences of vulnerability and exploitation, from the commonplace to the extreme, are linked to the broader social contexts in which they are engendered. The detailed data gathered will encourage better understanding of the complexity of these vulnerabilities so as better to inform legal and policy debate.