Sex workers as free agents and as victims : elucidating the life worlds of female sex workers and the discursive patterns that shape public understanding of their work

Abstract

In South Africa and many other countries worldwide, sex work is criminalised. This invariably seems to lead to back-door prostitution - an unregulated industry where sex workers are vulnerable to being exploited by pimps, brothel owners and law enforcement officers. In discussions about sex work and sex workers, two dominant views are evident: a) Sex workers freely choose to sell sex as a good way of earning an income; or b) sex workers are victims of their circumstances who are driven into the industry through direct coercion or as a result of dire poverty. Together, these views lead to an ideological trap in terms of which sex workers have to be perceived either as having agency and free will or as being helpless victims in need of rescue. My aim in this thesis was to problematise, deconstruct and reconstruct the discursive field within which sex work is embedded, in order to move beyond agency-victimhood and similar binaries, and in the hope of developing new ways of talking about prostitution that acknowledge the complexity of the sex industry rather than shoehorning it into preconceived categories. Social constructionism (epistemology), critical social theory (ontology) and discourse analysis (methodology) were interwoven in order to provide a broad, critical understanding of prostitution. Two data sources were used to gain access to and unpack the life worlds of sex workers: Semi-structured interviews with five sex workers in Johannesburg and the “Project 107” report on adult prostitution in South Africa. Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to make sense of the data, including an analysis of how concepts such as governmentality, power, confession, surveillance and technologies of the self can be applied to contemporary texts about prostitution. The “Project 107” report recommended that prostitution should not be decriminalised, and that sex work should in fact not be classified as work; instead, it proposed a ‘diversion programme’ to help sex workers exit the industry. I show how, in doing this, the report appears to hijack feminist discourses about sex workers as victims in order to further a conservative moral agenda. The sex workers I spoke to, on the other hand, demonstrated an ability to take on board, and to challenge, a variety of different discourses in order to talk about themselves as simultaneously agentic and constrained in what they can do by unjust social structures. I show how, from a Foucauldian perspective, sex workers can be seen not as pinned down at the bottom of a pyramid of power, but immersed in a network of power and knowledge, enabled and constrained by ‘technologies of the self’ to assist in policing themselves through self-discipline and self-surveillance to become suitably docile bodies within the greater public order.