Huge thanks to Read and Resist for allowing me to present this paper in September 2022.

This piece, which is more suggestive than conclusive, is going to use the example of sex work and its various frames of criminalisation, to argue that we cannot think about prison abolition as a strategy for the end of gendered violence, without taking into account the end of capitalism. I argue that while the construction and maintenance of the sexual labour market are predicated on capitalist values, it is not enough to argue for the decriminalisation of sex work.

Relating sex work, poverty, and gendered violence

There is a particular discourse which holds ‘trafficked victim’ in diametric opposite to ‘happy hooker’, and while some academic literature has moved past this binary, illuminating the various nuances, pressures and decisions which facilitate someone selling sex, there are many others who are embedded in this binary way of thinking.

The reason I mention these tropes pertaining to the sex industry is to argue that it doesn’t matter. Whoever sex works, whatever their reason for sex working, whoever controls them, however they got into the industry, it doesn’t actually matter. People sell sex because out of a range of options, it’s the best one to meet their needs, regardless of what those options are. This is true of survival or coerced sex workers, and this is true for more privileged agentic workers, and is especially true when we look at the conditions of working in late capitalism. As Jon Burnett argues, as there has been an ongoing “… race to the bottom in international labour standards, with regimes of ‘flexible accumulation’ involving ‘the fragmentation and cheapening of labour through widespread casualisation or informalisation of work… and a structural failure to provide jobs” Our conditions are worsening. Sex work is tempting.

When poverty and lack of income stability are key reasons why women move into the sex industry, it is a deliberate neoconservative strategy to not consider poverty a driving factor in violence against women. It is important to consider how sex work has become a form of ‘violence against women’ when we remember that yes sex work is gendered, but it is also overwhelming performed by racialised women, the working poor, migrants and those who are discriminated or folded out of the mainstream work force – here I’m thinking about trans, or gender non-conforming bodies, queer people or those who are disabled.

What do I mean by neoconservative strategy?

People who write off sex worker activism as middle class happy hookers have positioned sex workers as autonomous actors within the free market and complicit with what Rosalind Gill names as the “postfeminist and neoliberal discourses that see individuals as entrepreneurial actors who are rational, calculating and self-regulating”.

Sex work, within this discourse, can be understood as an ideation of neoliberal values. Men are consumers who shape the industry through their demand, and women (as well as their pimps and profiteers) are sellers who respond accordingly. It makes sense to think this way, to view sex and money as a route to feminist empowerment, and thus to understand sex workers as neoliberal subjects: self-managing, self-responsible, seeking self-advancement. In short, those who attack sex worker activists, do so because they position sex workers as working and thinking within a neoliberal discourse.

Arguing that sex workers are neoliberal because they ‘choose’ to sex work and find money to be ‘empowering’ speaks to many sex workers’ experiences, but this argument sidesteps the wider issue of why and how that choice might be so tempting. Though sex work is an individualised job, it is necessarily individualised through the partially criminalised framework which penalises working communally, cooperatively or through management.

Without wanting to suggest sex work as an advisable career move, it is undeniable that sexual commerce offers benefits not found in other gendered and racialised labour markets such as nannying, hospitality and care work. Benefits such as high earning power on entry, instant cash transaction and flexible working hours.

Is it worth asking, why is sex work, a place where these benefits are found, so heavily policed and regulated? I think that while we live in a world where capital is power, it makes sense to want to remove that power from undesirable persons. By undesirable, I’ll draw here on Jasbir Puar’s arguments on how the desires of white heteronormative citizens trump those queer alliances across race, class and citizenship.

The reasons for criminalising sex work as work may be twofold:

• firstly, capitalism depends on cheap migrant labour on which to outsource domestic work for the expansion of capital. Sex work is not part of that.

• and then, the seeming a-moralism and apolitical nature of neoliberalism is fused with neo-conservativism, with its deeply morally coded and political bias toward whiteness and heteronormativity.

As abolitionists, we know that when the ‘problem’ of trafficking or the ‘problem’ of women being bought for sex can be located to the bad men who pimp women and the other bad men who buy sex, feminist campaigners and governmental bodies alike can be seen to be effectively tackling the problem by calling to further criminalise these actions. Such a move absolves the state from examining its own role in the construction and maintenance of the sexual labour market. By emphasising criminal actions, and thus criminal solutions, state bodies can divert focus from their policies of immigration and asylum, employment, economic development, austerity and welfare. I make mention of neoconservatism as well as neoliberalism because while both are identifiable as a rolling back of, or disengagement of, the state; neoconservatives are especially focused on defunding public services, but constantly investing in police and other forms of militarised spending, as well as the aforementioned strong moral leaning.

This capitalistic rationale is the dominant political discourse currently and so it makes sense that they would co-opt feminist ideology to further its aims. It is feminist to help victims of sexual violence, of which sex work can be counted.

I’m going to pause here to make explicit that there are two interweaving discourses present

The first from a regressive feminist movement which calls for the criminalisation of sex work on the basis of opposing the neoliberalism that they perceive in sex worker activism, but in turn, they support a second neoconservative discourse that supports police expansion through criminalisation and it averts discussion of the role of the state in welfare.

Rather than addressing the reasons why women are vulnerable to being trafficked, or the causes which enable pimps to earn money from forcing women to sell sex, or the economic precarity that women live with if they do not sell sex, the state and its arms are able to sustain criticism whilst also staying committed to the neoliberal, neoconservative, capitalist doctrine.  This unholy alliance of feminism and the capitalist classes, means that, rather than seeing improvement or progress for women either in or out of the sex industry, neo-conservativism is further entrenched by individualising the cause of and solution to sex work.

The model of prostitution put forward by radical, or as we might consider them, carceral feminism, and governmental policy bears little connection to economic or structural factors and is wholly attributed to the actions of bad men. Perhaps this is why there has been little structural improvement or progress for women both in and out of the sex industry: the capitalist system which is what actually upholds the industry is more entrenched now than ever.

I’d like to draw your attention to this quote of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

“Modestly educated people in the prime of life are the people who are locked in prison and they are the people who work in prison. They are two sides of the same coin: those who have suffered organized abandonment and those who labor in the area of organized violence to keep steady the otherwise explosive conditions that people are living through.”

Here, Gilmore is speaking of the two sides of criminalisation which uphold each other.

Those who work in prison, the police, the army; who perform what Micol Seigel calls “violence work” – that is, the labour of violence. And those who are incarcerated in prison – those who need to exist in order to justify violence work.

What does all of this have to do with prison abolition?

Coming back to sex work as our example, in countries with the Nordic Model – a suggested legal framework which is taking place across the Global North, there has been little to no investment in social programmes, support services or welfare. Instead there has been a hyper-focus on law enforcement and the knowledge production of bad people who buy and innocent victims who to sell it.

The Nordic Model, a de facto protective order, is itself a form of violence, “organised violence” in response to “organised vulnerability”. Those who support the Nordic Model equate sex work with neoliberalism, rather than reflecting on how their own focus on interpersonal violence at the cost of state violence, as well as compliance with state militarisation and border control, shows how care and compassion can and are militarised and weaponised.

This is why it is not enough to argue for the decriminalisation of sex work, though I do support this, and I do believe that in this world, sex work is work. Part of decriminalisation is the tempting offer that we as sex workers can go to the police when someone hurts us with no fear of us being arrested. That is not good enough. I don’t want to work toward a world where sex workers are so valuable as capital generating citizens that we can call on the police to be violent on our behalf. Abolition is not just an abolishment of physical or state institutions, but a social theory of change that aims to abolish the conditions where criminalisation of any kind is the solution

So what now?

Mark Fisher hypothesised that it was easier to imagine end of the world than the end of capitalism. Capitalism may seem ontologically ubiquitous, but is it? While capitalism itself is constantly reaffirmed, people’s imaginings of it are changing. Capitalism has been discredited, but we need a rival to capitalism, not a response or a reaction to it.

I am not striving for a utopia where sex workers can align with a violent state, or where they can be empowered through their work with money. Nor am I fighting for a world where our ideal, or even our bare minimum, imagines those who move across borders for a better life can do so safely and legally.  

In my utopia it is not necessary to move across borders for work, because the Global North no longer extracts wealth; no one has to sex work, or do any work, and citizenship isn’t measured on how brutally or quickly the police will act on your behalf, or how much income you can scrape in. I don’t think that decriminalisation, and thus sex workers being worthy of protection because they are capital generating, is enough. I think we can imagine more.

Resources

Ruth Wilson Gilmore – Abolition Geography

Jon Burnett – Work and the Carceral State

Jackie Wang – Carceral Capitalism

Jasbir Puar – Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalisation in Queer Times

Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?

Rosalind Gill – Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility

Elizabeth Bernstein – Anything from 2010 onwards

Charlotte Rottenberg – The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism

Niina Vuolajärvi – Governing in the Name of Caring—the Nordic Model of Prostitution and its Punitive Consequences for Migrants Who Sell Sex

Angela Davis on Democracy Now – Angela Davis: We can’t eradicate racism without eradicating racial capitalism

What is neoliberalism?–With Lisa Duggan, Miranda Joseph, Sealing Cheng, Elizabeth Bernstein, Dean Spade, Sandra K. Soto, Teresa Gowan, and Ana Amuchástegui.

Paradoxes of Neoliberalism –With Sealing Cheng, Lisa Duggan, Dean Spade, Elizabeth Bernstein, Miranda Joseph, Sandra K. Soto, Teresa Gowan, and Kate Bedford

Politics Theory Other – The racial constitution of neoliberalism

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on The Intercept – Ruth Wilson Gilmore makes the case for abolition