Risky Bussiness_sanders_review Jane Scoular

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Teela Sanders, Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2005. 256 pp. ISBN: 1–843–92082–4 (pbk). £18.99. In a field dominated by research on street-based prostitution, Teela Sanders’s first book ‘Sex Work: A Risky Business’ offers a much needed analysis of the complexity and plurality of contemporary sex markets. Grounded in the lived experiences of 55 women operating in a range of settings (from saunas, escort agencies and streets to private flats) in the city of Birmingham, this fascinating study offers a real insight into the more empirically significant sectors of the sex industry. Avoiding what Weitzer calls ‘gratuitous moralizing’ (2000: 6), a tendency all too common in this field, and in keeping with a tradition of sound ethnographic practice, Sanders looks beyond the ascription of deviancy to uncover the more normative and routine elements of sex-work culture. In providing an empirically detailed yet analytically nuanced account of the organizational features of commercial sex this work complements an already rich body of scholarship in this vein (O’Connell Davidson, 1998; Brewis and Linsted, 2000; West, 2000). Sex Work: A Risky Business is also reminiscent of other more complex works in the field (Phoenix, 1999; O’Neill, 2001) in terms of its ability to contextualize and present complex, three-dimensional accounts of women’s lives. ‘In contrast to the homogeneous, perpetually victimized, and linear subject embedded in legal discourse’ (Scoular, 2004: 352) and present in a number of domination theories, Saunders refuses to allow structural constraints to collapse and flatten subjects who are presented as sentient and reflexive, resisting strictures imposed upon them and attempting to control their circumstances by assessing risks, adapting and changing practices as they learn from their own and others’ shared experiences. By the same token the author is not naïve and is careful not to overplay the ascription of agency, taking care to balance accounts with instances when structural divisions and occupational contexts hinder an individual’s ability to control outcomes. By combining a socio-psychological with a socio-structural analysis, Sanders is able to overcome the classic individual vs. structure/victimization vs. autonomy dualism. Rather, the interaction between women’s narratives and organizational and societal structures appears as a dynamic, the balance of which is highly contingent, and offers varying opportunities and varying quality of spaces for control, self management and co-operation. Power in this context is not viewed as a commodity owned by one group over another but is relational and, while recognized as being in many cases both economically and legally structured, its impact and its attendant risks are ‘not accepted but contested and negotiated by women in their interactions with both external structures and personal relations including economic relationships with clients’ (p. 41). By viewing women as subjects managing risks in prostitution, rather than as ‘risky subjects’ per se, Saunders’s work joins a tradition of post-structuralist work which marks a departure from previous studies on prostitution which focus upon an uncritical acceptance of negative criminological and/or epidemiological categories and, in doing so, (sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not) consolidate and legitimatize increased penal and medicalized forms of discipline and

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control. Sanders achieves an important fissure between subjects and their apparent ‘spoiled identity’ by moving away from modernist discourse and instead locates her study within the wider academic literature of governance, risk and regulation. Risk becomes an important device which serves to animate a discussion of the varying degrees and opportunities for agency and control in sex markets according to the interaction between individual biography and distinctive market structures. At the same time Sanders’s work provides empirical depth to an often abstract discussion of risk and social theory, serving to highlight the importance of gender, class and location. Sanders’s absorbing account situates women within a complex milieu of norms negotiated by a range of actors including managers and owners of premises who have an interest in maintaining a professional and safe working environment and clients who, like women (and unlike the increasing rhetoric of criminality and dangerousness), operate as risk assessors – an approach Sanders will expand upon in her future work. This promises to make a similar impact on the discipline as this study which is already an important and rich insight into sex workers’ self assessment of harms and reveals a shared hierarchy of risks, judged according to their perceived consequences and the degree of control that can reasonably be asserted. Accordingly, health is viewed as one of the more straightforward and controllable aspects of sex work, with condom use seen as integral to safety. Violence is considered a more unpredictable harm and attempts are made by women to reduce its occurrence through a complex system of precautions and workplace practices including careful selection of clients, information sharing and price setting all of which leads women to report that violence is a rare occurrence in indoor settings. Strikingly it is the emotional and psychological consequences of selling sex that is of most concern, the biggest risk, the hardest to control and recover from. Maintaining a separation between private and work identities involves a great deal of emotional work on the part of sex workers who feel less able to control the risks to self and others of the ‘irreparable’ collapse between working and private life that discovery engenders. Yet rather than supporting women’s efforts to manage such risks, Sanders, following Zatz, notes that these organizational aspects are in fact negatively influenced ‘by its legal and social sanctions (Zatz, 1997: 300) especially regimes of criminalization which do little to support women’s capacity for control and agency. Indeed Sanders notes that the quasi-criminalization of sex work in the UK means that policing, rather than supporting women’s safety, contradicts many of the routine elements of risk management, creating daily obstacles which women have to evade in order to avoid detection and further stigma. This insight is vital in terms of recent policy reforms that continually fail to recognize the structuring effect of law and uncritically seeks to increase legal control without critically reflecting upon the social, spatial and discursive exclusion that previous efforts have reified. An optimist may see some hope in the recent Home Office review that seeks to ‘allow’ women to work in pairs indoors and Teela’s and others’ work may have been influential here. Yet one wonders if the fine detail of such rich empirical work has been read if one considers the way in which self regulation remains strictly constrained by the state who seeks to extend

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regulatory powers and extend in particular criminal justice control over street work – suggesting that any protection gained for those indoors will be at the expense of their more public colleagues. We should be wary of protection premised upon a rhetoric of victimhood rather than a commitment to address the real structural issues that affect women in sex work as detailed by women themselves. This book offers valuable insight into their experiences which inform suggestions for reform to foster and increase their capacity for control.

References Brewis J. and Linsted, S. (2000) Sex, Work and Sex Work. London: Routledge. O’Connell Davidson, J. (1998) Prostitution, Power and Freedom. Cambridge: Polity Press. O’Neill, M. (2001) Prostitution and Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Phoenix, J. (1999) Making Sense of Prostitution. London: Macmillan. Scoular, J. (2004) ‘The “Subject” of Prostitution’, Feminist Theory 15(3): 343–55. Weitzer, R. (ed.) (2000) Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry. New York: Routledge. West, J. (2000) ‘Prostitution: Collectives and the Politics of Regulation’, Gender, Work and Organization 7(2): 106. Zatz, N. (1997) ‘Sex Work/Sex Act: Law, Labor and Desire in Constructions of Prostitution’, Signs 277. Jane Scoular University of Strathclyde, UK

E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 377 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3618-9 (pbk). $23.95. Being an East Asian queer, initially I was worried about reviewing a collection of essays on Black Queer studies as I carried a lot of theoretical and political baggage concerning ‘queerness’ and ‘raciality’. Would I be able to appreciate and respectfully comment upon specific Black issues and histories, particularly how they are articulated within Queer studies? Would I only be able to read it as a sympathetic ‘queer and racial Other’? I need not have worried, for Black Queer Studies moves away precisely from (dis)placing the reader into an essentialized self-conscious scrutiny and instead, encourages a self-reflexivity beyond the very discursive categorizations of identity politics (sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, gender). Black Queer Studies critically re-engages with what have become somewhat tired terms such as, ‘normativity’, ‘homogeneity’ and ‘assimilationist’, by questioning whether they are still ‘doing something’ for both Queer and Black theory/politics. Yet the

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