Abstract
Many theorists have analysed the workings of precarization and informal economic activities. Raven Bowen’s Work, Money and Duality contributes to this literature by analysing how British off-street sex workers (n=35) navigate and coordinate different combinations of sex work and non-sex work. As such, the book explores how workers guarantee economic flexicurity for themselves while also managing stigmatized (work) identities.
The book successfully shows duality as an effort to manage liminal social space, closing the gaps between social moments, identities and work. The author describes interlocutors as navigating the precarious political economy through socio-economic arrangements. They put forward intricate strategies to sustain these dual lives as they pertain a variety of relations, spaces and (dis)closure of information. Bowen explores these strategies through a relational approach, highlighting the centrality of meaning within social processes. Through these insights, the book calls for policies on sex work to be designed in collaboration with sex workers themselves to prevent the unwanted harm of etic models.
In her exploration of duality, Bowen starts by positing contemporary political economy as characterized by dual labour markets, devaluation and casualization (Chapter 1). As such, workers are nudged towards combinations of multiple jobs based on work availability. This choice architecture establishes interrelations between jobs, social worlds and identities. Furthermore, the author highlights the flexible nature of duality, implying fluid work arrangements that subjects need to navigate in peculiar ways. The complexities of this navigation are explored from the point of view of identity formation (Chapter 2), audience segregation (Chapter 3) as well as stigma avoidance (Chapter 5).
The book successfully shows the intricacies and risks implied in dual work identities, notably as they induce a bifurcation of consciousness. Dual workers regulate this bifurcation through routinized acts and rituals, helping them to conform to the role expected in the environment they find themselves in. Moreover, drawing heavily from Goffman, Bowen describes how interlocutors carefully segregate (online) spaces, interactions and trajectories to keep different publics – and identities – from overlapping.
Nevertheless, these social environments not only shield them from the negative effects of the disclosure of duality; rather, they also force them into self-monitoring and strategic relations to preserve ‘face’ in both stages. Moreover, contributors manage duality to protect themselves and their loved ones from the effects of stigma. To do so, they have to deceive people by ‘passing’ as members of non-stigmatized groups; however, this comes at the expense of their mental health. Thus, the author successfully highlights how contributors living dual lives continue to juggle between precarious jobs while also endangering themselves.
The contributions of this book are not only the detailed explanations of duality as a cultural and socio-economic process; rather, Bowen also depicts the stratification processes at work in the British sex industry, most notably colourism (Chapter 4). Bowen identifies the ideal sex worker as being thin, white, blonde, cisgender – against whom all other sex workers are evaluated. This valuation determines the financial resources available to different placements within the hierarchy, putting white (-passing) sex workers at the top. Moreover, Bowen highlights the hierarchization of whiteness the Brexit referendum revealed, showing how ‘dark’ Europeans from Eastern Europe are the least desirable among buyers.
Bowen’s engagement with the recognition of sex work as work shines through the two concluding chapters of the book. By following her interlocutors’ frustrations and disillusionment with work itself, the author returns on Marx’s thesis of alienation. Through this gesture, the book shows how sex workers’ exploitation is not inherent in the selling of sex itself; rather, it stems from the working conditions established by policies as socio-economic interactions. These specific and precarious working conditions are shared between sex work and non-sex work, inducing workers to engage in duality to fill in the gaps left open by processes of precarization. Bowen engages directly with this phenomenon through an extensive commentary of current policies around sex work. She concludes by demystifying the rhetoric of victimhood surrounding sex workers by showing how they are neither treated as victims nor as real workers.
Throughout this book, Bowen puts forward a thorough demystification of the stigma surrounding sex work from both policy-makers as well as (some) feminist scholarship. The book combines this demystification with a detailed analysis of duality as both a cultural and a socio-economic process, shedding light on the intricate strategies put forward by dual workers. Finally, duality emerges not as a rigid process, but as a fluid work arrangement with multiple and varied end-goals, from short-term project to stable duality towards class mobility.
The book has the merit to be accessible to a wide audience, from policy-makers to academics, interested in informal market relations and sex work. Work, Money and Duality does a great job in highlighting the lived experiences of sex workers as they negotiate dual lives within a precarized political economy.