Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Carol Leigh coined the term sex work in 1978. Leigh devoted her life to bringing dignity to sex workers and jettisoning stigma and shame; for her, one path toward this was to understand prostitution as a form of labor and those working in the sex trades as laborers. The term sex worker was a critical intervention coined by a feminist determined to unite with other sex workers in pursuit of rights and dignity. As Judith R. Walkowitz’s essay in this present issue explores in depth, sex worker as a term succinctly drew together the ideological investment in “work” among new left and feminist activists; the ideology behind it had been forming already but Leigh’s neologism wrapped these ideas into one usable identity. Since 1978 the term has spread in use around the globe—but not without detractors, as a number of our contributors document. Sex worker thus continues to be a term of linguistic contestation. For scholars who study the history of sex work and sex work activism, understanding the history of the term’s usage, as well as the competing meanings in specific times and places, is central to any full analysis of the topic.

Leigh, also known as the Scarlot Harlot, was recognized internationally for her devotion to the sex workers’ rights movement—her personality as fiery as her bright red hair, her activist strategies as flamboyant as her manner of dress. Rachel Schreiber first met Leigh at a meeting of BAYSWAN (Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network) in 2007. Everyone’s face lit up when Leigh entered the room—she was clearly a hero to many there. Between the inception of “Troubling Terms and the Sex Trades” and the completion of this issue we lost Leigh, who passed away in November 2022. Within that time frame we lost another titan of the sex workers’ rights movement, Margo St. James, founder of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and namesake of the St. James Infirmary.¹ Schreiber knew Margo from the St. James Infirmary and had also spent three days interviewing her (with her collaborator Barbara DeGenevieve) at Margo’s home near Bellingham, Washington. Walkowitz met St. James in the 1980s, when they both participated in roundtables on prostitution organized at Women and the Law conferences. Like Leigh, St. James was a powerful force in the sex workers’ rights community, admired by many. Both of these women understood deeply that language matters, and that the ways we understand those laboring in the sex trades as workers is important to the movement for sex workers’ rights, opposition to violence, and challenges to criminalization.

“Troubling Terms and the Sex Trades” began as a roundtable discussion hosted virtually by the New School’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute in October 2020.² Leigh was one of the presenters at the roundtable, and her influence was keenly felt. It became clear that more attention was warranted to analyze the terms we use as historians of the sex trades—usages that are political, value laden, and have deeply contested histories.

“Troubling Terms and the Sex Trades” presents writings that interrogate such terms in a variety of formats.³ The longer studies in this issue, grouped in the section titled Features, interrogate terms such as sex work, restricted area, red-light district, demand, decriminalization, and white slavery—all categories that inform many historical studies today and still surface in current political debates over prostitution. These in-depth studies refuse easy acceptance of the terms commonly used in the field but rather retrace these terms to their “moment of making” and move forward to track their circulation, subsequent histories and restatements, and political effects.⁴

As important, “Troubling Terms” also represents a collaborative intellectual project with activists and advocates from many regions about their own encounters with a critical keyword they have worked with or resisted. They share their thoughts about this intellectual/political history in short essays included in the Reflections section. These are short essays in which the authors present a first-person account of their encounter with their chosen term. Such encounters range from those of scholars who have studied topics related to the sex trades, to cultural and social workers in the field, to sex workers (and it is worth noting that these categories may overlap with an individual author occupying more than one role). Finally, Curated Spaces presents a brief essay and series of images that explore the history of a visual term—the red umbrella—which has developed into a global symbol for sex workers’ rights.

We are surely not the first historians to focus on terminology, keywords, and the use of language within our field of study. Perhaps most foundational in this regard is Raymond Williams’s book Keywords, a seminal work that lays the groundwork for understanding that the meanings of words and terms are historically contingent as well as culturally specific. As Williams writes, “words which seem to have been there for centuries” might in fact evolve over time to produce very different meanings.⁵ Not a dictionary but a collection of short pieces on a range of critical concepts, the approach is neither etymological nor lexicological but historical, examining the origins of each keyword.

Williams’s approach and format have influenced numerous scholars who have understood his formulation to be a call to action—an insistence that key terms, especially those that are contested, should not be treated ahistorically. Analysis of terms through the lens of historical change enables a deeper understanding of their contemporaneous use in a given time and place. For such terms are not “neutral” or “reliable,” as Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin assert; rather, their “history impinges on their current use.”⁶ For Lentricchia and McLaughlin, studying the histories of terms—literary terms, in their case—demonstrates that the ways such terms are used exposes the larger social and political problems of their times.

Jeffrey Weeks’s book The Languages of Sexuality follows in the keyword tradition established by Williams with a focus on the highly contested arena of sexuality (which is clearly relevant to this special issue).⁷ Weeks reviews the adoption of the term sex work and relates prostitution to a wide array of topics from coercion and decriminalization to markets, neoliberalism, and globalization. Picking up where Weeks left off, the present issue historicizes terms such as prostitution, sex work, trafficking, and decriminalization, which are not only contentious feminist issues but disputed words with important and complex histories. To be sure, in doing so, this issue also builds on the works of previous historians of prostitution who may not have expressly focused on “keywords” or “terms” but nevertheless attended to the shifting connotations attached to such terms. Central to this discussion, for example, prostitution as a term has itself been a regular subject of inquiry, not only by Weeks but by other scholars of the field as well.

Since the 1970s, feminist historians have undertaken the task of historicizing prostitution, presenting it not as an inevitable or unchanging feature of human relations but as the multiform product of shifting material and power relations. The result is a rich, wide-ranging, and diverse body of scholarship. Some of the most important studies published in the 1970s and 1980s produced grand narratives of regulated prostitution, a system of surveillance that usually involved police registration, spatial segregation, and medical inspection of subaltern women. To explore the workings of power, these histories used the strategies of Marxian and Foucauldian-inflected social history to excavate official archives.⁸ Reading official documents against the grain, they began the work of recovering the history of laboring subjects, their plebeian milieux, and their experience. The texts they produced demonstrated the centrality of prostitution to systems of policing and surveillance, social and medical knowledge, modern state building and empires, and popular protest campaigns. Even without regulation, historians and historical geographers uncovered localized practices of informal spatial policing designed to organize urban spaces, segregate populations, and constrain prostitutes’ mobility and their ties to a working-class milieu.⁹ In recent years, another generation of scholars have used “big data” from digitized sources to craft more intimate histories of marginalized individuals and their migratory paths.¹⁰ Whether broad Foucauldian institutional histories or microhistories of individual subjects, the cumulative historical record in this field positions sex traders within the shifting terrain of urban capital and land use; regional, national, and imperial economies; household and family systems; criminal and makeshift economies; migration patterns; commercial entertainment; and the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexualities.¹¹ Prodded by the cultural turn, historians have also explored the unstable and contested meanings that surrounded prostitution and how and why it functioned as a reference point in imaginary urban landscapes, popular media, and cultures of modernity, not to speak of bodily identities.¹² Produced over fifty years, this distinctive scholarship reflects an enduring and striking consensus across generations of feminist historians regarding three key features of modern prostitution: prostitution is and remains a form of sexual labor, intensified policing has negative effects on sex traders, and feminist interventions on behalf of their “lost sisters” have had decidedly mixed outcomes.

Many historians of prostitution subscribe to a professional ethos, proffered by Gail Hershatter, of a “new, improved reflexive historian . . . sensitive to contested meanings and polyvocal perspectives,” conscious of the way she “and her contemporary concerns enable the telling of certain stories while occluding others.” But, Hershatter warns, this “reflexive historian” must also “remember that everything in the historical record itself bears the traces of earlier contests and concerns.”¹³ “Traces” and their ideological baggage, we argue, inform not only the rhetorical structuring of documentary sources but also the analytic keywords that historians use to frame their own arguments.

Despite their considerable achievements, historians of prostitution, even those sensitive to the rhetorical structuring of their sources, have tended to be less “reflexive” when it comes to interrogating their own critical terms and the sedimented histories that trouble them. To convey that uneven development, let us consider two key terms with long histories that remain part of the analytic toolkit of contemporary historians: sex work and trafficking.

As noted above, historians of prostitution overwhelmingly interpret prostitution through a labor framework. Some historians embrace this laborist perspective because it reflects the situated knowledge of their historical subjects: their research finds that “work,” “business,” and “getting a living” were part of the occupational vocabulary of prostitutes, at least in such varied locations as sixteenth-century Augsburg, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, nineteenth-century Plymouth, and early twentieth-century Chicago.¹⁴ By the mid-twentieth century, Walkowitz tells us in this issue, the language of work in anglophone spaces had evolved into the occupational identity of the “working girl.” For both historians and their subjects, “work” signaled a form of description stripped of moral judgment, one that positioned prostitute women in the context of working-class life. Prostitution was an income-producing activity, an extension of the social logic of poor women who regularly moved across licit and illicit activities to make ends meet. But when scholars discussed sexual labor in their histories, they tended to invest it with loftier meanings than their historical subjects, thanks to the dual legacy of Thompsonian social history and what the critic Kathi Weeks describes as the “feminist work ethic” dating back to the nineteenth century.¹⁵ By figuring women in the sex trades as workers, historians felt empowered to register them as agents rather than victims and as historical subjects capable of self-realization, relative autonomy, and collective organization.

Luise White’s 1990 The Comforts of Home exemplified this laborist trend and historians’ debt to evolving paradigms of work. Linking the labor forms of prostitution found in colonial Nairobi with rural economies, wage labor, family political economy, and housing, The Comforts of Home inspired dozens of materialist studies across the globe. Based on oral histories of prostitutes who worked in Nairobi in the 1930s, it shows the unacknowledged “traces” of late twentieth-century feminist thinking about women’s work, especially Marxist feminist debates around the politics of housework.¹⁶

Leigh’s linguistic innovation, sex work, introduced in the late 1970s, heightened the political resonance of work in other ways. Sex work now signified the full panoply of commercial practices in an expanding sex industry populated by individuals of diverse sexualities and genders.¹⁷ It could signify not “simply work,” as it was assumed to do by many prostitutes of the past, but also the practice of skilled “sex-positive” professionals, engaged in creative and therapeutic activity.¹⁸ Finally, sex work became a political slogan for a collective movement that spread across the globe, very different from the sporadic, localized, and short-term protests of sex traders of previous epochs. Chants of “Sex work is real work” now feature regularly in advocacy for sex workers’ rights.¹⁹ For this reason, we asked all our contributors to consider whether and how they wanted to use the term sex worker to apply to historical subjects prior to the 1980s.

If historians have been reticent about examining the ideological underpinnings of a work paradigm, this is partially because sex as work has long been central to rights-based politics for workers in the sex trades, a cause that most historians in this field embrace. By contrast, researchers who study the history of “trafficking” have been quite reflexive about the category and ready to acknowledge its constructed nature. This may owe to the fact that historians of prostitution tend to distance themselves from contemporary abolitionist politics, for which trafficking is a prime target.²⁰ Like work, trafficking has a long, blurry, and shifting history as a political category and subject of concern. Even more so than work, it fails to convey the complexities of coercion and consent in the sex trades, particularly when it is addressing the sexual labor of nonwhite and migrant subjects. Though the term appeared earlier in regard to imported labor broadly conceived, beginning in the 1880s trafficking came to signify the illegal movement of women, organized by third parties, to engage in “forced prostitution.” Originally, it signified coercion, but increasingly it has been applied indiscriminately to the nonconsensual as well as the consensual movement of people (most often cisgender women) deemed to be prostitutes. Initially framed as “white slavery,” trafficking was always “caught up within racialized conceptions of migration, belonging, and citizenship, complex ideas about gender, sex, and labor, and troubling analogies to enslavement.” As a consequence, historians have long regarded the “trafficking of women” to be an “unreliable” category with “limited explanatory power.”²¹

Historians’ discomfort with trafficking is sharply evident in a 2021 special issue on the subject appearing in the Journal of Women’s History, coedited by Philippa Hetherington and Julia Laite. When the two historians sat down to propose a special issue on trafficking, they did not incorporate trafficking into the title of the issue and opted instead for “Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labor.” Trafficking was a troubling “political discourse, media phenomenon, and cultural script,” yet they did not dispense with the term: trafficking appears 203 times in their long introductory essay, which is entitled “Trafficking, a Useless Category of Historical Analysis?” Trafficking, moreover, recurs on multiple occasions in all the other articles in the issue. According to Hetherington and Laite, one reason for this continual engagement with a deeply problematic term is that its very imprecision allows “states and others to deploy the specter of trafficking to enact laws and policies against migration and sex work . . . and rarely address the actual exploitation of harm at hand.”²² In other words, this blurry, unreliable category had material effects: in its persistent and shifting iterations, trafficking produced “structures [of subjection], cultures, laws, and lived experiences” in different times and places.²³ The essays in Hetherington and Laite’s collection, focused on Latin America, the Philippines, the United States, Russia, France, and Poland, testify to trafficking’s mutability and relevance to national and international laws, surveillance systems, political networks, as well as narratives deployed by “trafficked” women to navigate systems of state control. Hetherington and Laite conclude by articulating the same mixed sentiments about trafficking that they shared in their introductory remarks: “While trafficking is sometimes a useful heuristic for historians it is also a conceptual trap. . . . Historians of ‘trafficking’ must deploy terminology and concepts as semi-normative shorthand, even as we historicize the moment of its making and examine the way this naming created new social realities.”²⁴

“Troubling Terms” takes an approach similar to that of Hetherington and Laite, expanding such an exploration to a wide range of terms associated with the sex trades. Each of the essays throughout the sections Reflections, Features, and Curated Spaces centers on a particular “troubled term.” Despite their focus, connecting themes do emerge across these works, often in dialogue with one another. One key theme is “sex work,” which is not surprising given its centrality to the field as well as its legacy within the historiography discussed above. Walkowitz traces how the formulation of sex as work took hold in the UK and briefly discusses its global circulation. According to Walkowitz, a work paradigm became central to advocacy work, including efforts toward decriminalization, while it was disputed by abolitionist antitrafficking groups and even by some nonactivist sellers of sex. The central concept here, of commercial sex as a form of labor, circulates through a number of the Reflections as well. Raven Bowen defines survival sex work in opposition to sex work. Whereas sex work involves remunerative exchange, mutual consent, and transactional negotiation, survival sex work pertains to conditions in which a sex trader “lacks the opportunity to refuse work.” While Priscilla Alexander, in “From Activist to Ally,” focuses on her own transformation, she proudly identifies her strategic role in COYOTE in publicizing prostitution as a form of labor and her (successful) efforts to shift the World Health Organization’s nomenclature for sex traders to the term sex worker. By contrast, White resists the trend toward sex worker. While she is deeply aware of the increasing global prevalence of the term sex worker, as a historian she remains unconvinced that the term adequately describes the labor of the women who are the focus of her research in Nairobi. White questions the primacy of the term sex in sex worker, as the women she studied engage in forms of labor with their clients that extend beyond sex into other kinds of service provision.

Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith’s Reflection on working girl similarly focuses on the concept of work, examining the nuances of the differences between such a term and sex worker and reflecting on feelings of comfort, and at times unease, with taking on these identities. Here, and in the work of additional authors, a second theme of self-naming and identity emerges across the essays. Lorraine Nencel discusses the meanings of the term sex worker as well as its effects on identification among the workers she studied in Peru, Kenya, and Ethiopia. She recalls that, even though the term sex worker had spread globally, she had to take care not to impute it to the communities she was studying, where it did not resonate and had not taken hold.

Identity and representation thread through additional essays. Eunbi Lee explores the stereotypes surrounding Asian massage workers, who are often assumed to be sex workers. She links the stereotype to its roots in US militarization, colonialism, and immigrant identities. Christina Carney similarly interrogates the intersections of race, nationality, and the impacts of militarization as she examines the ways that Black women working in the sex trades in and around San Diego at the turn of the twentieth century faced legal and criminal challenges and extralegal discrimination. Jo Krishnakumar shares a personal experience at Pride events in Mumbai, where an interaction with a trans sex worker led them to think through the commonalities and differences among those who identify as LGBTQ in India and the sex worker community. Jo Weldon muses on the descriptor classy, as it had been applied to some strip clubs, and how that shaped her own self-identification as a dancer in these spaces. Both Alexander and Schreiber reflect on their experiences taking on the identity of ally to the sex workers’ rights movement. These two pieces underscore what can be “troubling” about terms because Schreiber and Alexander register different experiences with this descriptor, including changing historical conditions under which they became “allies.”

For those working in the sex trades, identity and stigma are deeply entwined. Two sides of the same coin, stigma is the lens through which sex workers are seen due to long histories of criminalization, sexist attitudes about women’s “proper” social roles, and misogynistic ideas about female promiscuity. Kate Marquez grapples with what it meant to come to terms with their own identification as a prostitute, bumping into their other identities as a “parent, ex-wife, student or daughter.” Stigma, we learn from Gail Pheterson, not only affects a sex worker’s reception in the world but also contorts the views of “feminist allies” about women’s motivations to engage in sex work. In Curated Spaces, Nicole Archer and Rachel Schreiber explore the red umbrella as a signifier for sex workers’ rights, illuminating how an umbrella can both unify sex workers “under its canopy” and also shield identity, when needed, to avoid stigmatization (and criminalization).

While many of our contributors weigh in on sex work as a meaningful political term and the attendant identities of sex workers, other authors address the other “side of the equation”: demand and the (typically) male client. Elisa Camiscioli and Eva Payne trace the shifting meanings of demand for prostitution politics and policies across three national spaces, many international accords, and over two centuries. Nineteenth-century defenders of regulated prostitution invoked “hydraulic metaphors” to convey men’s desire and justify the double standard of sexuality underwriting regulationist systems. In her Reflection on sex addiction, Tracy Quan observes similar tensions between transgression and disease in contemporary understandings of sex addiction, as well as class-stratified therapeutic techniques available to elite “sufferers.”

Camiscioli and Payne also trace how challenges to male demand informed the evolution of antitrafficking campaigns. Women’s rights advocates and middle-class moral reformers disputed the “necessity” of prostitution and denounced regulated prostitution as immoral, unhealthy, and a violation of the personal rights of working-class women. Regulated prostitution, abolitionists argued, artificially inflated male demand and incited illegal traffic in women and children. This abolitionist argument about the “traffic in women” continued to be debated internationally and has more recently informed some feminist antiviolence campaigns to “End Demand.” The debate over supply and demand continues until today; both Walkowitz and Naomi Akers point to the contemporary advocacy role of medical outreach programs in support of criminal justice reform and labor rights.

Spatial keywords also feature in this issue, testifying to the centrality and arbitrariness of spatial policing as a strategy of governance. Annalisa Martin explores the history of Sperrbezirke (restricted areas). After the West German Constitution of 1949 abolished regulationism, local ordinances prohibiting visible prostitution in specific urban areas were passed and Sperrbezirke were established. However, the Sperrbezirke forced sex workers to navigate convoluted and random policies. Unlike Sperrbezirke, which never circulated beyond German borders, the US term red-light district has gained traction across the globe. According to Katie M. Hemphill, the term had its nineteenth-century origins in Midwestern railroad and mining towns. First connoting the “red lights” of nighttime businesses of pleasure combined with the red danger warnings of railroad crossings, red lights ultimately spatialized into “red-light district” as local authorities introduced zoning laws to restrict commercialized sex to specific neighborhoods. The spatial policing of sex businesses in turn provoked antiprostitution campaigns that denounced informal toleration of vice.

Zoning and space are also key to the politics of decriminalization discussed in this issue. In “Does Decriminalization Do It?” the activists Eurydice Aroney and Julie Bates provide insider perspectives on the relative merits and limitations of decriminalization as a legal reform. Along with John Scott and Jane Scoular in their long essay on the genealogy of decriminalization in New South Wales, all four authors agree that decriminalization might not be the holy grail hoped for by sex workers and their advocates. Scott and Scoular emphasize the neoliberal features of decriminalization as a system of governance, a feature they see prefigured by harm reduction arguments for decriminalization dating back to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Aroney and Bates partially concur but still argue that decriminalization represents an important first step to social justice.

The debates over decriminalization, as well as many of the topics discussed above, coalesce in powerful ways, particularly in the last few decades, in debates about “sex trafficking.” As has been discussed earlier in this introduction, the historiographic discourse on trafficking is extensive and well developed in its attention to the effects of the term. Moral panic over the traffic in women has, from its beginnings, been rooted in systemic racism through its associations with nativism and anti-immigrant xenophobia. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship that unpacks the deeply racialized implications of the term white slavery, Christina Carney exposes the irony of the term via her case study of the (over-)policing of Black women in turn-of-the-century San Diego. The discourse on trafficking regularly arises in relation to postcolonial, immigrant, and nonwhite subjects. Lee discusses the ways that individuals working within the Asian massage industry are always thought to be either “traffickers” or “trafficked.” And Empower’s contribution reveals the colonialist importation of the term to Thailand and the attendant rise of the “rescue industry.”

Our contributors’ diverse writings on demand, decriminalization, abolitionism, and regulationism also coalesce around trafficking. As Camiscioli and Payne write, “The idea that male demand led to female sexual exploitation would mark antitrafficking campaigns from the early twentieth century to the present day.” Across a broad sweep of history, these authors explore the ways that discourses around demand—that is, male appetites for commercial sex—shape antitrafficking discourse and calls for abolition. Contemporary abolitionists reject the distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution, as Walkowitz addresses, seeing all women engaged in the sex trades as victims of exploitation. Ultimately, for many activists and advocates of sex workers’ rights (and indeed, many of the authors included here), trafficking rhetoric obviates the possibility of sex workers’ agency and deepens hierarchies of race, geography, class, gender, and more. Given this judgment, the recurrent investigations into the semantics of trafficking discourse are not surprising.

This overview of recurring topics in the present volume is surely not exhaustive. There are, to be sure, topics and themes that have not been explored in “Troubling Terms” but that certainly warrant deeper historical inquiry. Among these, some that readily come to mind are regulationism, abolition, medicalization, pleasure, danger, and violence. Though many of these terms are indeed invoked by various of our authors, each term could be elucidated more fully in its own essay. Beyond topics, we also decided early on to limit our scope and not attempt to address additional broad fields such as pornography (print, film, or web-based) or internet-based practices (“camming,” for example)—topics that historians are just beginning to explore. Also largely absent from this special issue, in some ways most centrally, are investigations into workers of all genders, beyond cisgender women (currently estimated as 83 percent of the sex work force), as well as non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative sex trades.²⁵ Throughout these pages, we have endeavored to be attentive to the fact that a wider range of sex workers’ identities exist. Nevertheless, given the long legacies of patriarchy and male domination, it is worth highlighting that the legacies of terminology related to the sex trades quite regularly implicate the troubling histories of sexism and misogyny. It is our hope as editors that future scholars will turn to the additional areas of study noted here and further develop this body of knowledge.

The genealogies presented here should therefore be understood as exemplary of a methodological approach that never takes for granted the histories, legacies, and effects of linguistic choices. Overall, “Troubling Terms and the Sex Trades” demonstrates the political and scholarly value of interrogating the ideological baggage attached to analytic keywords used by historians and activists alike. Tracking the historical shifts and circulation of these terms exposes their global spread but also the key importance of localized differences. These terms parallel the political, cultural, and structural histories of prostitution and reveal dialectical political contests as well as material shifts in spatial organization, surveillance and governance, practices of self-naming, and cultural and emotional entanglements with the figure of the prostitute.

The editors wish to thank Isabel Glusman, research assistant extraordinaire from The New School’s Sex Tech Lab, for her work on this project.

Notes

References