This collection brings together established and exciting new voices to shed light on the language of and about sex work, offering an empirically nuanced understanding of commercial sex through language.
While there is burgeoning literature on sex work in the social sciences, there has been little work to date centering it from a linguistic perspective. Chapters make the case for language as central to sex work practices and the transactions of intimacy in the negotiation of services, promotional strategies and the performance of desire. Featuring insights from diverse geographic contexts, the chapters critically reflect on different dimensions of language and sex work, including sex work, gender and desire; online sex work; sex work and race; sex worker advocacy; and the language of victimization and exploitation. The volume illuminates the ways in which commercial sex work is negotiated in embodied linguistic interaction and attendant issues of power, identity, gender, race and desire.
This book systematizes the body of growing knowledge around language and sex work from an interdisciplinary lens. It is key reading for scholars, policymakers and activists in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, as well as fields such as anthropology, sociology, criminology and health and social care.
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
1 Speaking of sex work: Setting a research agenda
BENEDICT J. L. ROWLETT AND RODRIGO BORBA
2 ‘Why do you think a woman can’t enjoy sex as much as a man can?’: Discourses of women’s sexual desire, pleasure and agency in an online sex work forum
HOLLIE MCILHONE, ROBERT LAWSON, MATT GEE AND PELHAM CARTER
3 The pleasure of pleasing: a corpus-assisted small stories approach to male clients’ affective identity constructions of heterosexual desire in PunterNet reviews
SAGREDOS CHRISTOS
4 ‘I’m not a faggot, I’m a man’: Male sex workers doing masculinity talking sex
CIRUS RINALDI, MARCO BACIO AND RICCARDO CALDARERA
5 Polyvalent attribution and the discursive construction of Blackwomen’s sexual labor in The Boondocks
DEANDRE MILES-HERCULES AND MARIAH WEBBER
6 ‘Good evening you sex-hungry crowd!’: Discursive-corporeal performances and strategies of a Black male sex worker on X/Twitter
GLENDA CRISTINA VALIM DE MELO
7 The narratives she lives by: Identity, intersection and agency in the many roles of a Filipina sex worker in Hong Kong
BENEDICT J. L. ROWLETT AND JASON POLLEY
8 Sissy hypno in a trans-affirming register: Shifting semiotics of pornography online
MAUREEN KOSSE AND KIRA HALL
9 Computable desires: Platformed sex work and the datafication of intimacy
EDUARDO MARTINS
10 Resisting discrimination against sex work/ers: A critical discourse analysis of comments on YouTube
EVELIN NIKOLOVA
11 Sex workers’ place of enunciation: A materialist discourse analytical approach
MARIA FERNANDA MOREIRA, KARINE DE MEDEIROS RIBEIRO AND LAURO BALDINI
12 Hyperbole for advocacy: Stereotypical and subversive sex work in Naty Menstrual’s writing
JOSE ANTONIO JÓDAR-SÁNCHEZ
13 The dynamics of agency in sex work: Discursive constructions of violence in transnational contexts
JILL MCCRACKEN AND RAN HU
14 ‘Foreign, illegal prostitutes’ and ‘New Zealand working girls’: Sex workers as villains and victims in media discourse
MATILDA NEYLAND
15 ‘I am not a victim of anything’: Minors identified as victims of human trafficking in Italy
TRINE MYGIND KORSBY
Index
Biography
Benedict J.L. Rowlett is Associate Professor in the Academy of Language and Culture at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Rodrigo Borba is Associate Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme in Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
