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This article considers the terms prostitution, sex work, transactional sex, and survival sex, the logic of their deployment and utility to research concerned with people who are paid for sex, and HIV. The various names for paid sex in HIV research are invested in strategically differentiated positionings of people who receive payment and emphasize varying degrees of choice. The terminologies that seek to distinguish a range of economically motivated paid sex practices from sex work are characterized by an emphasis on the local and the particular, efforts to evade the stigma attached to the labels sex worker and prostitute, and an analytic prioritizing of culture. This works to bestow cultural legitimacy on some locally specific forms of paid sex and positions those practices as artifacts of culture rather than economy. This article contends that, in HIV research in particular, it is necessary to be cognizant of ways the deployment of alternative paid sex categories relocates and reinscribes stigma elsewhere. While local identity categories may be appropriate for program implementation, a global category is necessary for planning and funding purposes and offers a purview beyond that of isolated local phenomena. We argue that "sex work" is the most useful global term for use in research into economically motivated paid sex and HIV, primarily because it positions paid sex as a matter of labor, not culture or morality.
This article considers the terms prostitution, sex work, transactional sex, and survival sex, the logic of their deployment and utility to research concerned with people who are paid for sex, and HIV. The various names for paid sex in HIV research are invested in strategically differentiated positionings of people who receive payment and emphasize varying degrees of choice. The terminologies that seek to distinguish a range of economically motivated paid sex practices from sex work are characterized by an emphasis on the local and the particular, efforts to evade the stigma attached to the labels sex worker and prostitute, and an analytic prioritizing of culture. This works to bestow cultural legitimacy on some locally specific forms of paid sex and positions those practices as artifacts of culture rather than economy. This article contends that, in HIV research in particular, it is necessary to be cognizant of ways the deployment of alternative paid sex categories relocates and reinscribes stigma elsewhere. While local identity categories may be appropriate for program implementation, a global category is necessary for planning and funding purposes and offers a purview beyond that of isolated local phenomena. We argue that "sex work" is the most useful global term for use in research into economically motivated paid sex and HIV, primarily because it positions paid sex as a matter of labor, not culture or morality.
States have a responsibility to protect their citizens and at times have to take coercive action to isolate or incapacitate those who carry infectious diseases and threaten the health of others. Such measures have included the fourteenth-century Venetian requirement for ships arriving from plague infected ports to sit at anchor for forty days 1 before landing; the forcible medical examination and detention of female sex workers under the Contagious Diseases Act 1864 in England; 2 and the closure of businesses and the cancellation of Christmas celebrations in Sierra Leone in 2014 in response to the Ebola epidemic. 3 Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to liberty and security) provides an exemption for 'the lawful detention of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases.. . '. 4 Th ere are many methods that states can deploy for dissuading individuals from spreading infection, including providing education, off ering encouragement or incentives, and imposing civil regulations. 5 Until recently, few societies have attached criminal liability to disease transmission. 6 Whilst public health orders lack the expression 1 Th e word 'quarantine' is derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni meaning 'forty days' (E. Tognotti , ' Lessons from the history of quarantine, from plague to infl uenza A ' , Emerging Infectious Diseases , 19 : 2 (2013), 254. 2 Similar versions were enacted in most of the colonies, see, for example, P. Levine , ' Venereal disease, prostitution, and the politics of Empire: the case of British India' , Journal of the History of Sexuality , 4 (1994), 579. 3 'Ebola crisis: Sierra Leone bans Christmas celebrations'. www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-africa-30455248 , 12 December 2014. 4 Article 5(1)(e) European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. 5 State action is not always necessary. Th e villagers of Eyam in Derbyshire, England, heroically isolated themselves in 1665-6 to stop the spread of the plague (W. Wood , Th e History and Antiquities of Eyam (London: Th omas Miller, 1842)). 6 Th e Canadian Criminal Code included an off ence of knowingly transmitting a venereal disease, but this was repealed in 1985, largely because it had not been used since 1922
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