Navigating Stigma: Institution Building in the Sex Workers Rights Movement

• In Event: Human Rights and Sex Trafficking

Abstract

“Nothing about us, without us!” is a common rallying cry for the sex workers’ rights movement internationally. Historically, research on sex work has ignored sex workers’ perspectives, sometimes yielding unethical scholarship and practices that reinforce stigma and shape harmful policies. Often, this results in regulatory policies that reinforce stigmatized gendered ideologies of what sex work is (i.e., inherently exploitative) and who sex workers are (i.e., victims or criminals), even in locations where sex work is legal and regulated.

Employing Grounded Normative Theory, drawing from the testimonies of grassroots actors and activists and their personal archives, I demonstrate the strategic agency of a population often politically constructed as “powerless.” Prioritizing the lived experiences of those “on the ground” brings important perspectives that challenge existing theories and ideas about how power and identity operate in dynamic ways in public life. In doing so, I forward a theoretical framework that builds on a burgeoning current of work in the human rights scholarship that centers narrative and testimony, but also shows the tactics sex workers use for agential institutional creation, drawing from frameworks in New Institutionalism. By centering sex workers’ narratives, I demonstrate the bottom up construction of rights, through sex workers’ rights claim-making, shifting their identity from victims to agents, as they articulate rights within a social and economic rights, and specifically, labor rights frame. I aim to bring the issues of sex worker organizing and negotiation into conversation with the broader economic and labor rights literatures, of which it is so frequently excluded.

Author

• Erica E MacDonald, University of Connecticut