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Abstract: Sex work discourse operates with multiple assumptions about what it means to be involved in sex work and, subsequently, what it means to no longer be involved. These assumptions combine to produce a one-dimensional categorical framework for thinking about sex work participation – in which sex workers are labeled ‘involved’ or ‘exited’ – that ignores the diverse ways sex workers make sense of and participate in their work. This study uses the narratives of twenty-five women with experience in Edmonton’s street-level sex trade to engage in a critical rethinking of the meaning(s) and practice of sex work involvement. I bring participants’ lived experiences into a dialogue with current theorization around four guiding questions: 1) What does involvement mean, 2) What does involvement look like, 3) What does it mean to exit, and 4) How can we best acknowledge the complexity of sex work involvement? Findings reveal that sex work involvement is the product of multiple intersecting open-ended vectors that produce an infinite number of relationships with the sex trade. Vectors speak to elements like frequency and manner of participation, level of income dependency, and subjective interpretations of participation, which are themselves contextual and dynamic, with the result that the significance and practice of involvement varies among sex workers as well as over time. Eschewing generalizations in favour of plurality, variability, and contradiction, this dissertation reveals there are unlimited ways to ‘be’ a sex worker and ‘do’ sex work. Accordingly, I advocate for a discursive shift away from categorical approaches that theorize ‘involved’ and ‘exited’ as distinct and stable categories, towards process-based methodologies that make involvement itself the focus of inquiry.

When police arrested nineteen women in Dedza, Malawi hospitality locations in 2016, it was under the guise of the living on the earnings of prostitution laws. The women appealed and won their case, with the ruling judge noting that Malawian women are free to patronize any hospitality facilities or bars without fear of being arrested. The case, The Republic v. Pempho Banda and 18 Others, sparked a national debate over the social and legal status of sex workers in the southern African country. It also brought to light that efforts to stimulate tourism had inadvertently boosted the country's sex work industry. To move away from a reliance on agriculture and bolster socio-economic growth and its foreign exchange earnings, the country is positioning itself to gain a greater market share of visitors. However, as in many tourist destinations, the promise of sex attracts tourists, and sex is increasingly becoming a central offering of Malawi's tourism industry. Yet, Malawian sex workers continue to occupy a social status in which they are marginalized or mistreated by the general public and criminal justice system. This provides apt conditions for continued and increased human rights abuse against sex workers. This research explores the events, legal environment, media coverage, and public opinion surrounding this case and its relation to the tourism industry. The data is from interviews with actors in the criminal justice system, documents and an analysis of online media about the Pempho Banda et al. case. My dissertation highlights the complexities and contradictions surrounding sex work in Malawi. In doing so, I hope to intervene in the national debate surrounding sex workers so as to facilitate public opinions and policies that are more sex worker friendly and protective of their human rights.

Abstract: Research shows that the sex trade flourishes in oil rich regions and economies. However, the connection between these two industries has not been widely studied despite how studies often acknowledge that oil industry workers purchase sexual services. This thesis, therefore, explores how the oil production culture contributes to oil industry workers purchasing sexual services. This research project aims to explore answers to the following research questions: 1) How does the oil production culture contribute to oil industry workers purchasing sexual services; 2) What economic and social aspects of the oil production culture contribute to oil industry workers purchasing sexual services; and 3) What can we learn about the sex trade and the oil industry when using a feminist lens? In addition, this research project draws from literature on masculinity, Messerschmidt’s theoretical work on masculinity, and feminist theory. I used a qualitative exploratory methodology to answer the research questions. In total, I conducted 11 semi-structured interviews, including five oil industry workers and six indoor sex workers. My major findings suggest that there is a strong economic connection between the oil industry and sex trade, as well as that negative views of women, the objectification of women, and the normalization of purchasing sex, are all pervasive aspects of the oil production culture. However, the negative treatment of women within the oil industry seems to be context specific to the oil production culture insofar as I also found there are no significant differences in sex workers’ interactions with oil industry worker clients compared to non-oil industry worker clients. I conclude that the frontier masculinity found in the oil production culture is an expression of masculinity specific to the context of the oil industry. This thesis, then, offers contributions on three main topics: what it is like working in the oil industry; the lifestyle and culture of the oil industry; and the connection Alberta’s oil industry has to indoor sex work.

Numerous scholars and activists attempt to define what the transnational sex trade is and what it should or should not be. Each of the groups involved in this struggle to categorize sex labor channel different representations of the category, or discourses. This paper analyses how three feminist scholars, of varying perspectives, define transnational sex labor, and despite their widely different viewpoints, marshal similar conceptual categories. Their discourses rely on notions of or attempts to police women’s “appropriate” labor and/or comportment and human rights and workers’ rights discourses. While the authors do not identify their works as such, I argue they are all part of a wider conversation of defining the realm of social reproductive labor. Throughout these three scholar’s writings, the category of social reproductive labor is silent, but represents another way of understanding and interpreting both transnational sex labor and political mobilization, contextualized within capitalism.

The United States enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 to combat the crime of organized firms engaging in the trafficking of humans. The TVPA has resulted in competing definitions and competing agendas which contribute of a public misunderstanding of the nature and scope of human trafficking as a domestic policy issue. Early goals of protection of victims, prevention of future trafficking crimes, and prosecution of traffickers have not been met with empirically driven success. This paper outlines obstacles facing evidence-based legislation in the state of Maine which currently has no stand- alone law protecting victims of sex trafficking and seeks to provide a simple guideline for increasing legislative support.

In its serial space, David Simon’s The Wire season two relates the seemingly “disconnected” union men, foreign sex worker women, and African-American drug traders and crosses constructed boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and geography to evoke the possibility of a transnational working class. The Wire’s serialized narrative trespasses the limitations of money and numbers games and of individual characters to build, scene by scene, what Roderick Ferguson calls in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique “the location for new and emergent identifications and social relations” (108).

Human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal activities in today’s world and a violation of human rights. Sex trafficking of women from Russia and Ukraine was enabled by the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the incorporation of the new countries into the global economy. At the same time, this social problem generated a series of anti-trafficking campaigns in Russia, Ukraine, and internationally. This research analyzes social responses to the risks of sex trafficking of women from Russia and Ukraine. The analysis is based on sixteen-month multi-sited field research in Russia and Ukraine. I collected data through participant observation, interviewing, and document analysis. The research provides insight into the supply and demand sides of sex-trafficking markets and describes how sex trafficking of women is integrated into the overall organization of the global sex trade. I use institutional ethnography to map out different anti-trafficking institutions (NGOs, governmental offices, international organizations) and examine social relations engendered by anti-trafficking mobilizations. My research analyzes institutional interventions aimed at minimizing the risks to sex trafficking victims. I explore how the institutional actors form transnational regulatory spaces to combat the problem of sex trafficking. Finally, I analyze how female trafficking survivors negotiate their identities in response to the institutional power of anti-trafficking NGOs that assist them.