A Sexual Outlet Changes Everything: Examining Organizational Narratives of Legal Sex Workers and Disabled Clients

• In Event: 1569 - Sexual Body Politics (Cosponsored with Section on Body and Embodiment)

Abstract

This paper examines public organizational narratives of legal sex work organizations that specifically serve disabled clientele. Data for this paper was collected through virtual ethnography of two legal sex work organizations’ online presence by examining their websites as well as featured stories, a related documentary, and a comment section. Through a narrative analysis, our findings demonstrate the construction of sex workers as moral workers, providing socially necessary services for disabled clients. This narrative, while successful in fighting stigma associated with sex work, consequentially reinforces stigmatization of disabled people through victim portrayal. Additionally, our analysis shows a culturally informed assumption that if disabled men do not have sex they will engage in public deviant activities, contributing to the deconstruction of heteronormativity by disrupting the familial model. As such, audiences believe that it is important that sex workers provide these services, thus reinforcing heteronormative expectations of family structures. In claiming sex work with disabled clients as a moral imperative, the non-normative practices of sex workers that are commonly evaluated as immoral are constructed within heteronormative conventions. Our analysis indicates the consequences of these narratives reinforces the cultural mandate to protect heteornormativity, which outweighs the cultural understanding that disabled bodies engaging in sexual activity are deviant. Disabled bodies are encouraged to engage in sexual acts, as long as it promotes heteronormative expectations.

Authors

• Carley Geiss, University of South Florida

• Justine Egner, University of South Florida