‘I am Elena’: Romanian sex workers, trafficking politics and precarity in Nottingham, United Kingdom

• In Event: Perspectives on sex work

Abstract

For some time now, migrant sex work in the United Kingdom has been conflated with trafficking, resulting in trafficking frameworks and sex work regulation riddled with the ‘schizophrenic identifications’ of migrant sex working women as illegal migrants or victims/suffering bodies, which shapes policy responses and sex workers’ experiences. Based on in-depth interviews with Romanian sex workers in Nottingham, we explore issues surrounding the current orthodoxy of migrant sex work as trafficking and the concomitant regulation of non-normative bodies via criminalizing frameworks that compounds the pervasive inequalities and injustices sex workers face. We discuss the role of trafficking and criminalising frameworks in inducing precarity and violence; convergence and divergence in feminist theories and sex worker experiences; positioning of Romanian sex workers in global and local hierarchies of power and their attempts to earn a living, contest hegemonic frameworks and seek support.

Authors

• Diana Blaj, POW Nottingham

• Larissa Sandy, University of Nottingham

• Daisy Matthews, Nottingham Trent University