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This article attempts to uncover the discursive practices that have framed recent debates on prostitution in the Republic of Ireland. As Ireland prepares to introduce Swedish-style laws, which criminalize the purchase of sexual services, we are particularly interested in interrogating the dominant construction of prostitution in recent policy debates and consultations. Taking these spaces as sites for the reproduction of discursive and material practices, we employ methods of critical discourse analysis through Carole Bacchi's (1999) 'What's the problem represented to be' approach to question: How is prostitution problematized in Irish law and policy? We argue the representation of prostitution in neo-abolitionist discourse in Ireland operates through gendered and racialized assumptions about sex workers and migrant women. The material consequences of this have implications not only for current prostitution law and policy proposals but also for wider feminist spaces in Ireland.

This article interrogates the connections between normativity and geographical space. Specifically it focuses on the biopolitical discourses that operate around the idiom of the vulnerable female trafficked migrant in the United Kingdom. The article’s structure and argument question how state parties frame the notion of female vulnerability as a distinct biopolitical category. I argue that this process produces and sustains the perceived need for biopolitical regulation of the national community. I question how the state’s regulation of the bodies and behaviours of female trafficked migrants is entangled with anti-immigration agendas that aim to extend the power of the state extra-territorially.

This article interrogates the discursive framing of recent law and policy debates on criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland and the implications this has for sex workers' political voice. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's work on the political dimensions of justice, we look at how Irish neo-abolitionists, through their Turn Off the Red Light (TORL) campaign, map and delimit access to political space and consequently misframe, misrecognize and misrepresent the 'problem' of sex work and sex-working women. We employ the methodological framework suggested by Carol Bacchi's What's the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) approach to explore how TORL campaigners exercise and manage framesetting in law and policy contexts to deny all 'other' voices parity of participation in political space. We argue these misframing strategies reflect meta-political injustices of misrepresentation.