Sex Work and Sex Workers’ Unionization

The variety of conditions and meanings in the sex industry has been widely documented. Even what is, or is not, “prostitution” or “sex work” is not an objective fact established once and for all time, but is often contested and resisted. In fact, what appears to define “sex work” or “prostitution” is the very fact that it is labeled as such: that is, the “stigma of prostitution,” a set of opinions, behaviors, and laws that isolate, discriminate, and punish anyone explicitly exchanging their sex labor for material advantages. This stigma has been crucially challenged by the sex workers' movement, which emerged in the 1970s and is currently increasingly visible at the global level. While traditional political parties and funders have largely denied support to this movement, in many contexts sex work activists have been part of larger grassroots movements inspired by labor, feminist, LGBTQ, anti‐racist, and HIV‐positive critiques.