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Sex Workers and Criminalization in North America and China

Ethical and Legal Issues in Exclusionary Regimes

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

Authors:
  1. Susan Dewey

    1. University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA

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  2. Tiantian Zheng

    1. Sociology/Anthropology Department, State University of New York, Cortland, Cortland, USA

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  3. Treena Orchard

    1. School of Health Studies, Western University, London, Canada

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  • Draws upon years of ethnographic research with hostess bar workers in China and women engaged in street-based sex work in the U.S. and Canada
  • Investigates the legal, social and public policy issues involved
  • Examines researchers’ strategies for ethically engaging with sex workers in these criminalized environments
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Anthropology (BRIEFSANTHRO)

Part of the book sub series: Anthropology and Ethics (AAE)

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Table of contents (4 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Law, Public Policy, and Sex Work in North America and China

    • Susan Dewey, Tiantian Zheng, Treena Orchard
    Pages 1-26

  3. Systematic Collusion: Criminalization’s Health and Safety Consequences

    • Susan Dewey, Tiantian Zheng, Treena Orchard
    Pages 27-50

  4. Negotiating Systematic Collusion: Autonomy, Citizenship, and Resistance

    • Susan Dewey, Tiantian Zheng, Treena Orchard
    Pages 51-73

  5. Researchers’ Negotiations of Systematic Collusion

    • Susan Dewey, Tiantian Zheng, Treena Orchard
    Pages 75-96

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 97-99
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Keywords

About this book

Sex work continues to provoke controversial legal and public policy debates world-wide that raise fundamental questions about the state’s role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. This book unites ethnographic research from China, Canada, and the United States to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of negative consequences for sex workers’ health, safety, and human rights. Such consequences are enabled through the operations of an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Criminalized sex workers report police harassment, seizure of condoms, and adversarial police-sex worker relations that enable others to abuse them with impunity. Chapter Three describes how sex workers negotiate these restrictions on their rights and personal autonomy via their arrest avoidance and client management strategies, self-treatment of health issues, selective mutual aid, rights-based organizing, and entrenchment in sex work or other criminalized activities. Chapter Four describes how researchers working in countries or locales that criminalize sex work face ethical concerns as well as barriers to their work at the practical, institutional, and political levels.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA

    Susan Dewey

  • Sociology/Anthropology Department, State University of New York, Cortland, Cortland, USA

    Tiantian Zheng

  • School of Health Studies, Western University, London, Canada

    Treena Orchard

About the authors

Susan Dewey is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on research methods, sex work, and public policy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 

Tiantian Zheng is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at State University of New York, Cortland. Her book Red Lights is the Winner of the 2010 Sara A. Whaley Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association for the significant contribution to the topic of women and labor. Her book Ethnographies of Prostitution in Contemporary China is the Winner of the 2011 Research Publication Book Award from the Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences in the United States. 

Treena Orchard is an Associate Professor in the School of Health Studies and an Affiliate in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. An anthropologist with cultural and medical expertise, she has conducted ethnographic research with women in sex work, people with HIV/AIDS, Aboriginal populations, and those of sexual minority status across Canada and in India. Her areas of special research interest include sexuality and sex work, gender, marginalization, and the politics of health. Her research has been fund

ed by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Western University. She is also involved in local and national activism related to the rights of women and other marginalized populations.

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