Boundaries of Legitimacy: Sex, Violence, Citizenship, and Community in a Local Sexual Economy

• NCJ Number: 174681
• Journal: Law and Social Inquiry Volume: 22 Issue: 3 Dated: Summer 1997 Pages: 543-580
• Author(s): L E Sanchez
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 38 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: University of California, Irvine; Ford Foundation; American Soc of Criminology
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Drawing on field work with sex-trade participants in a northwestern U.S. city, this study explores how the cultural logic of modern liberal law shapes women's identities and interpretations of their actions.

Abstract

The study recounts the stories of a small group of women involved in the sex trade in a predominantly white, working-class community in the Pacific Northwest. The author's field work included observations and taped and untaped conversations with women in their work environments and social settings over a period of 3 years. In addition to speaking directly with women in the sex trade, the author conversed with women's friends, partners, and customers and interviewed local police officers and counselors at an advocacy group designed to assist women in "escaping prostitution." Data were also obtained from police policy manuals, State labor statistics, and media reports about the Evergreen sex trade. The ethnographic method used by the author attempts to set women's stories within the dynamics of the particular geographic and social interaction spaces in which their daily activities occur. Thus, the effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality on the social organization of specific interaction spaces and the surveillance of activities within those spaces are integral components of the analysis. The paper makes two interrelated arguments based on study findings. First, it challenges the notion that women in the sex trade operate purely by choice or by force. Rather, it suggests that agency, in this context, is contingent; it takes form in embodied interactions that are negotiated and renegotiated between individuals in the context of structured interaction spaces and specific relations of power. Second, the paper argues that treating women in the sex trade as sexual outlaws who are denied many rights of citizenship makes them more vulnerable to violence. Women's efforts to assert agency are not only limited by the demands of their customers, they are also subject to the disciplinary practices of the legal regime. 25 notes and 95 references