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‘The Worst Thing is the Screwing’ (2): Context and Career in Sex Work
Author(s) -
Brewis Joanna,
Linstead Stephen
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
gender, work and organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.159
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0432
pISSN - 0968-6673
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0432.00105
Subject(s) - patriarchy , context (archaeology) , sociology , gender studies , variety (cybernetics) , work (physics) , sex work , focus (optics) , qualitative research , sex workers , social science , history , engineering , research methodology , population , medicine , mechanical engineering , demography , archaeology , family medicine , artificial intelligence , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , computer science , physics , optics
This article, and an earlier linked one, focus on the labour process of the modern Western female prostitute. Drawing on available qualitative research from the United Kingdom and Australia, and research undertaken by one of the authors in New South Wales, we argue here that the ways in which individual prostitutes understand themselves, the work that they do and their relationships with clients are at least partly informed by the discursive context of their labour. We seek to highlight the variety of discourses which currently give shape to prostitution in the modern West, and in so doing discuss the ways in which individual workers may engage with these discourses to make sense of their life‐world — for example, whether they understand themselves as victims of patriarchy or as feminist activists. In this second article, then, our focus moves from the encounter between the client and the prostitute to the prostitute's career, and we provide a discussion of the various ways of understanding how and why prostitutes enter the profession, how and why they stay in it, how and why they exit this occupational field and how and why they understand themselves in particular ways following such an exit.