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Most towns and cities in the UK and USA possess a number of venues offering sexually orientated entertainment in the form of exotic dance, striptease or lap dancing. Traditionally subject to moral and legal censure, the majority of these sex-related businesses have tended to be situated in marginal urban spaces. As such, their increasing visibility in more mainstream spaces of urban nightlife raises important questions about the sexual and gender geographies that characterize the contemporary city. In this paper we accordingly locate the phenomena of adult entertainment at the convergence of geographic debates concerning the evening economy, urban gentrification and the gendered consumption of urban space. We conclude that these sites are worthy of investigation not only in and of themselves, but also because their shifting location reveals much about the forms of heterosexuality and homosociality normalized in the contemporary city.

The articles in this collection explore how the meaning of buying and selling sex changes according to the social, cultural and historical processes in which transactions are situated. In an earlier article published in this journal, I proposed a theoretical framework for the cultural study of commercial sex that would liberate researchers from the restrictions of a debate intensely meaningful to some but highly repressive to many others, centring on whether prostitution can ever be work or must be considered violence against women (Agustín 2005a). My call for papers using a cultural framework read.Given the proliferation of forms of commercial sex, the scarcity of researchexcept on 'prostitution' -is remarkable. The focus is usually on personal motivations, the morality of the buying-and-selling relationship, stigma, violence and disease prevention. Questions of desire and love are usually sidelined; relationships are rarely contextualized culturally or conceived as complex; concrete sexual issues are hardly dealt with. Commercial sex is usually disqualified from cultural research and treated only as a moral issue. A new field of the cultural study of commercial sex would refer to all commercial goods and services with an erotic or sexual element -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.Sites of the sex industry:

Sex-industry culture includes large numbers of people offering to help people selling sex. Outreach, a concept developed to take health products and services to hard-to-reach groups, involves complicated cultural interactions. As with others who apply governmental technologies, social figures inventing and carrying out outreach projects often justify their actions without reference to what the `needy' actually need, relying instead on discourses of solidarity, empowerment, self-esteem and social inclusion. Narratives of scenes from outreach with migrants who sell sex in Spain provide an opportunity to examine and question aspects of a social project usually considered transparently benign but which can be more than a little troublesome.