Examining Organizational Narratives: Public Appeals of Morality, Emotions, and Medical Logic in the Case of Sex Work for Disabled Clients*

Abstract

This study examines public narratives of sex work organizations that specifically serve disabled clientele. We utilize virtual data from two organizational online presences, including featured client and worker testimonials, a related documentary film, and audience commentary. Our analysis illuminates (1) the organizational characterizations of disabled clients as deserving and in need of sex services, (2) depictions of sex workers as moral, medical practitioners, and (3) plots and moral lessons that legitimate organizational services through medical logic. We argue that while such storytelling has the potential to persuade audiences through cultural appeals to morality, emotion, and medical logic, it simultaneously stigmatizes disabled people while constructing moral hierarchies of sex workers.

#ActuallyAutistic: Using Twitter to Construct Individual and Collective Identity Narratives

“…Narratives are "simultaneously about the personal, the social, and the cultural" and they inform and are informed by private life, "public social processes, social forces and societal institutions" (Loseke, 2019, p. 85). This methodological approach requires the researcher to begin the analysis by situating the contexts of stories via asking reflective questions and considering the authors, claims, and audiences (Geiss & Egner, 2021;Loseke, 2012). After compiling all the data into NVivo for analysis I began by asking: Who are the authors?…”

“…A Narrative Analysis of Twitter is especially useful as comments, liking, and retweeting allows a researcher to examine what narratives are evaluated as valuable and taken up by a specific community (Egner, 2019a(Egner, , 2019b. Recent scholarship has utilized virtual methodology to explore narratives in the digital world (Busby & Laviolette, 2006;Geiss, 2019;Underberg & Zorn, 2013), and I have recently examined how narratives are constructed, employed, modified, and imparted in virtual spaces (Egner, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, Geiss & Egner 2021.…”