Whilst sex-work policy in England and Wales claims gender-neutrality, local and national prostitution strategies primarily focus on female street-based sex workers. Men who sell sex are generally absent or inadequately considered in such policies, and measures to regulate commercial sex markets are rarely considered in terms of their impact on male working practice. Drawing on the Coordinated Prostitution Strategy for England and Wales, this paper has two aims: first, to offer a gender-based critique of the current policy framework for England and Wales by arguing that sex-work policy is infused by a gendered understanding of sex work in which male identities are neglected or assumed deviant; and second to explore the notion that understanding sex work as it is performed locally is valuable when generating local and national policy. Informed by gendered readings of policy, social understandings of masculinity, and the (in)visibility of male sexual commerce this paper explores male sex work in the context of Manchester, England.

From studies of 'panoptic' CCTV surveillance to accounts of undercover police officers, it is often mooted that visibility and invisibility are central to the policing of public space.However, there has been no comprehensive and critical assessment of this axiom. Drawing on the practices of a variety of policing providers and regulators, and the work of geographers, criminologists and other social scientists, this paper examines how and why visibility underpins the policing of public space. We begin by considering the ways in which policing bodies and technologies seek to render themselves selectively visible and invisible in the landscape. The paper then moves on to explore the ways in which policing agents attempt to make 'incongruous' bodies, behaviours and signs variously visible and invisible in public space. We then offer a sympathetic critique of these accounts, arguing that more attention is needed in understanding: (i) how other senses such as touch, smell and sound are socially constructed as in and out-of-place and 'policed' accordingly; and (ii) how the policing of undesirable bodies and practices is not simply about quantitative crime reduction, but conducted through qualitative, embodied performance. The paper concludes by pinpointing key areas for future research.

Twenty years ago, Ashworth et al (1988) offered a distinctive and innovative interpretation of a neglected aspect of the urban scene: the red-light district. Focusing on the location of female prostitution in a series of Western European cities, their paper suggested that the geographies of sex work are revealing of some of the 'less obvious' social and political processes that shape urban space. Here, we revisit Ashworth et al's paper in the light of subsequent developments in the organisation of commercial sex as well as the study of sexuality and space. Noting important continuities as well as major shifts in the location of sex work, with a significant shift to off-street forms of sex working having occurred, this paper argues that some of the ideas in Ashworth et al's paper remain highly pertinent, but others appear in need of updating. In particular, we stress the importance of focusing on men as both clients and workers within the sex industry, and flag up a number of connections that might be made with the emerging literatures on the geographies of sex itself. We hence conclude by considering Ashworth et al's paper as an important early intervention in debates surrounding the relations of sexuality and space, albeit one in which questions of gender, embodiment, and sexual desire remained largely unexplored.

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