Abstract
Sex Workers Unite offers a new empirical account of a particularly marginalized, disenfranchised, and stigmatized group. Melinda Chateauvert is a historian and activist who draws on a range of theories (human rights, social movement, identity, intimacy, and labor), and varying and often discordant feminisms, to explore the 50-year-long history of sex worker rights efforts in the United States. Sex workers experience economic, legal, social, and physical violence, and they have been organizing and voicing their needs, desires, and frustrations for decades. The book is part of a wave of contemporary research that demystifies sexual labor and offers a larger sociopolitical context for the actual experiences of sex workers.
Chateauvert makes two major contributions to the study of gender and sexuality. First, Chateauvert details how traditional citizenship politics and pushes for inclusion have historically wrangled sex workers to the margins of lesbian and gay organizing, feminist activism, and slut activism. When the Compton or Stonewall riots are taught in college classrooms, do we leave out or centralize the role of sex worker leaders? At SlutWalks, whether or not sex workers are welcomed depends on the city and its organizers. Transgender activists, sex workers, people who use drugs—these are activists who are often left out of academic and activist accounts of social change. With deep and colorful historical detail, the book explores the intersections of sex workers and sex worker rights organizing with gay liberation, feminist activism and feminist theorizing, riot grrl, and more recently, slut activism. Sex workers, because of the nature of their work, have been marginalized queers and sidelined feminists. Sex workers have a contentious relationship with feminism, with many questioning the feminist enterprise because of the discrimination and oppression experienced at the hands and voices of feminists.
Second, the book argues that sex workers challenge our understanding of rights (and of feminist solidarity), and in so doing, illuminates the potential for a structural shift in citizenship rights and theorizing. Chateauvert takes a novel approach in using the term straights—reconceptualized beyond a heterosexual meaning to mean all who defend a monogamous, private, noncommodified (not overtly, at least) sex/uality. Police and many lesbian feminists are considered “straights” in this context, actors in a social milieu resolved to open up the status quo to proper, deserving, sexual-but-not-too-sexual women and homonormative lesbians and gays. “Straights” fail to challenge social policies and cultural norms that dictate appropriate gender and sexuality. Instead, it is sex workers who demand radical changes to carceral politics and cultural assumptions about gender, work, poverty, violence, and autonomy. Today, in the midst of third-wave feminism and anti–sex trafficking abolitionist ideology, sex workers face unique challenges and have responded in unique ways to center themselves in efforts and conversations about them.
One particular strength of the book is found in Chateauvert’s account of how both marginalization and criminalization are forms of violence against sex workers. The heavy criminalization of sex work in the United States is illuminated through the lens of organizing politics, rather than a debate over the meanings of forced labor or false consciousness. Another strength of the book is its ability to humanize sex workers and amplify their voices. These analytic perspectives may help readers situate their own understandings of sexual commerce, gender politics, and labor rights in new ways.
The book is useful for both those with no knowledge of sex work scholarship and activism and those with some background in the study of commodified sex. Scholars and students interested in LGBTQIA efforts or feminist thought will find new insights on the historical roots of feminist and queer activism, and its implications for theorizing gender and sexuality today. For those with knowledge of sex work scholarship and activism, Chateauvert articulates the changes within the sex worker rights movement. Previous efforts grounded in “civil rights-oriented strategies” have given way to a “human rights framework” (p. 14) and “cultural activism” that challenges slut-shaming and “whorephobia” as violations of basic human rights, and by extension, a violation of basic citizenship.
Sex Workers Unite illuminates the vibrancy of the sex worker rights movement in the United States. The book is appropriate for upper-level classes and graduate courses on social change/social movements, gender and sexuality, LGBTQIA studies and queer studies, human rights, citizenship, identity politics, and feminist theorizing. Considering the continued debates and discussion around trafficking politics and the rise of antitrafficking efforts on college campuses, Chateauvert’s book can help activists, students, and academics alike understand the nuances of human rights for sex workers.