Sex Workers Organize

Ditmore, Melissa Hope

doi:10.1215/9780822389606-008

Cited by 34 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, researchers have looked at sex workers’ organisations, their political alliances and forms of unionisation, as well as their impact on policy change (West 2000; Mathieu 2003; Gall 2007; Garofalo 2010; Andrijasevic et al 2012; Majic 2013; Garofalo Geymonat 2016; Jackson 2016). Some found that sex workers’ struggles to reduce exploitation are similar to those we find with respect to other forms of reproductive work, such as domestic and care work or other forms of intimate and affective labour (Ditmore 2007; Cobble 2010; Hardy 2016). For instance, sex workers are concerned by fines for bogus infractions at work, being compelled to do unpaid overtime, bullying by managers, and being forced to work long hours without breaks, as well as by the quality of the relationship with their clients, and the high risk of burn-out (Sanders 2004; Vanwesenbeeck 2005; Gall 2006; Sanders & Hardy 2014).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Ambivalent Professionalisation and Autonomy in Workers’ Collective Projects: The Cases of Sex Worker Peer Educators in Germany and Sexual Assistants in Switzerland

Geymonat

Macioti

2016

Sociological Research Online

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Drawing on participant methodologies this article examines two cases of workers’ self-organised projects oriented to improving the quality of sex work and to ‘professionalisation’. The first case is a group of sexual assistants for people with disabilities, who have organised meetings and training for sexual assistants in a medium-sized city in Switzerland. The second is a group of peer sex worker educators offering workshops to people who sell sex in various industry sectors in a large German city. We argue that these activist interventions may represent a resource for identifying crucial aspects of work-quality and professionalisation in sex work and for making sense of some apparent contradictions of sex workers’ organising. Indeed, through ongoing conversations and recommendations about working practices and ethics, our participants develop situated views of what is better sex work and they originally engage with key conceptual areas, such as consent, autonomy, standardisation, income and professional identity. They do so by comparing a variety of experiences in sex industries, as well as discussing similarities with other jobs such as body work, care work, and psychotherapy.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Ambivalent Professionalisation and Autonomy in Workers’ Collective Projects: The Cases of Sex Worker Peer Educators in Germany and Sexual Assistants in Switzerland

Geymonat

Macioti

2016

Sociological Research Online

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“…There is by now a significant body of scholarship that looks at the connection between sex work and other kinds of labour and acknowledges the affect involved. See Agustı´n (2007), Brewis and Linstead (2000), Chapkis (1997), Cheng (2010), and Ditmore (2007). Feminist scholars who disagree with this approach include Barry (1995) and Jeffreys (2009).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective sex: Beauty, race and nation in the sex industry

Rivers-Moore

2013

Feminist Theory

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This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's 'exoticism' and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.

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“…As our introductory example of Perec’s seemingly dull street scene indicated, these movements are not limited to particularly turbulent encounters, let alone predicated on artistic interventions; they play out in conventional organizational settings, too. In contexts of work and organization, the everyday performance of affect has been studied by analysing the affective labour of organized sex work (Ditmore, 2007) and health care workers (Ducey, 2007); affective geographies have been mapped as affective cartographies of organizational change (Lohmann & Steyaert, 2006), as organizational atmospheres (Borch, 2009) and organizational geographies in slow motion (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012). Shifting the aesthetic of the uncanny from a ‘proper’ psychoanalytical understanding to its embodied construction out of a spatial vortex of affects thus constitutes an important step towards the mapping of everyday organizational landscapes of affect.…”

Section: Discussion: Theorizing and Researching The Organizational Unmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strangely Familiar: The Uncanny and Unsiting Organizational Analysis

Beyes

Steyaert

2013

Organization Studies

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This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an ‘unconcept’ that allows us to think and apprehend ‘white spaces’ of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating intensively with the conventional places, streets and squares that form the backdrop to everyday life. We also make use of the notion of ‘unsiting’ to show how organizational research is able to enhance our appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of organization in ways that expose and undermine that which has become familiar and taken-for-granted. Based on an artistic intervention by the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, we encounter and analyse such processes of unsiting through the affective and spatial doublings at work in the organization of urban space. Theorizing the organizational uncanny opens up new sites/sights in organization by forging an interconnection of the recent affective, spatial and aesthetic ‘turns’ in organizational theory. To do this demands what we call scholarly performances that involve the witnessing and enacting of everyday sites of organizing.

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Sex Workers Organize

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

Ambivalent Professionalisation and Autonomy in Workers’ Collective Projects: The Cases of Sex Worker Peer Educators in Germany and Sexual Assistants in Switzerland

Ambivalent Professionalisation and Autonomy in Workers’ Collective Projects: The Cases of Sex Worker Peer Educators in Germany and Sexual Assistants in Switzerland

Affective sex: Beauty, race and nation in the sex industry

Strangely Familiar: The Uncanny and Unsiting Organizational Analysis

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