For the past decade, and in numerous capacities, I've toiled as a sex worker. I've peddled my trade in bars and hotel rooms, on the sets of feminist pornos, and in shady peep shows. I also work in academia—arguably, an equally shady enterprise. If there's one notable, cultural shift that has impacted both my occupations over the past 10 years, it's the increased focus on—indeed, an obsession with—sex trafficking. And this isn’t the first time in recent history that cultural “do-gooders” have turned their attentions to the wiliest and most unsavory among us—The Whore.
As documented by historian Judith Walkowitz—who has researched 19th-century contestations over sexuality for the past 30 years—representations of sexual danger in late-Victorian London emerged as a projection of larger cultural and political unrest. Because of bourgeoisie anxieties over sex working women’s upward mobility at the turn of the century, narratives of sexual danger circulated as justification for the state control of poor women’s bodies and sexual behavior.
[For more of this story, written by Juniper Fitzgerald, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...earch-on-sex-workers]
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