Abstract
In November 2018, the Irish Sex Work Research Network (ISWRN) 1 held a workshop and launched the inaugural ‘Laura Lee Sex Workers’ Rights Annual Lecture’ series in conjunction with the United Kingdom Sex Work Research Hub (UKSWRH) at Trinity College Dublin. 2 Ms Lee, a Trinity College law graduate and sex worker activist, worked courageously and tirelessly for sex workers’ rights. On that day, her friends, supporters and colleagues gathered to honour her memory and work and re-committed to continuing the work of social justice for sex workers.
Addressing those present, Luca Stevenson, co-ordinator of the International Committee on Sex Workers’ Rights in Europe, reflected on how governments across European Union Member States failed to respond appropriately to the realities of sex workers’ lives. Stevenson observed that current law and policy initiatives to tackle the ‘problem’ of prostitution ‘lack a bit of nuance about our vulnerability’. Such vulnerability stems from the social injustices of marginalisation and precarity that sex workers experience daily. By bringing these papers together in this collection, our aim is to advance a stronger social justice agenda around sex workers rights.
Advancing social justice for sex workers draws on a definition of social justice established by feminist scholars, Dr Sharron FitzGerald and Dr Kathryn McGarry, in their edited collection Realising Justice for Sex Workers: An Agenda for Change (2018). Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice, they argue that social justice is ‘the idea that everyone deserves parity in terms of opportunities, political rights and distribution of wealth and privilege to participate as peers in social life and lead fulfilling lives’ (FitzGerald and McGarry, 2018: xv). Undertaking their research as a feminist ‘politics of doing’, FitzGerald and McGarry argue that an agenda for change grounded in the principles of social justice must develop sustainable law and policy reforms and initiatives that address the realities of sex workers’ ‘lived experiences’ of socio-economic, political and cultural exclusion and marginalisation. Thus, for FitzGerald and McGarry, an agenda for change for sex workers begins with the realisation that the ‘doings’ of our research and practice are ‘key sites of social change’ and must be both inclusive and democratic (Bacchi and Everline, 2009: 2).
Advancing social justice for sex workers contributes to this vision of a feminist politics of doing transformative research. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, it offers alternative paradigms and methodologies to advance an agenda for change for sex workers. Developing a politics of doing sex work research requires that we devise our questions differently, develop clearer knowledge and understanding of the definition and constitution of social justice for sex workers and then apply this to rethinking sex workers’ positions in social relations and research conducted with, not simply on or for, them.
All contributors to this special issue take this methodological objective as their entry point into the analysis. Specifically, they locate their contributions in the morally and politically fraught landscape of Irish and international feminist prostitution politics. From different vantage points, contributors use the politics of doing social justice research and the step change in prostitution law and policy on the island of Ireland as testing grounds for theories and critiques that have international jurisdictional and political resonance.