Racialised Sex Workers in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

This project will be the first in-depth examination of Black women's place in the late twentieth-century British sex industry, shedding light on this marginalised group that is near-invisible in scholarship. Exploring intersections of racialisation, working poverty and sex work, my research will link Black sex workers' experiences to their position as Black women in postwar Britain. While much of the women's movement condemned sex work as uniquely degrading, my work will investigate how race was readily integrated into socialist feminist interpretations of sex work as the product of poverty. My research will explore the legacy of historical stereotypes of racialised sexuality dating back to Empire and ask whether this amounted to a forced racialisation for Black sex workers. Complicating notions of a homogenous 'Black' experience, my work will investigate how sex workers of Asian origin were racialised in different ways to their African and Caribbean counterparts.