By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. We mostly learn about women in prostitution through representation by nonsex-workers: activists, policy-makers, journalists, and academics.
What comes through are often hypersexualized and essentialized images of sex workers as either victims or agents. This dichotomy not only essentializes their lives but also undermines women as partners for engagement. Against this background, what could be learned from photographs taken by women in prostitution of their everyday lives?
How do they supplement or challenge existing discourses of prostitution? What do the photographers and viewers get out of such an endeavor? And finally, what do the quotidian aspects of life have to do with research on sex work and sexuality in general? These are some of the questions this essay raises through the author's experience of organizing an exhibition of photographs taken by women in a South Korean red-light district in The project took place at a time when these women's lives were undergoing dramatic change at the intersection of neoliberal development and anti-trafficking projects, materialized in the demolition of the red-light district and increasing criminalization of prostitution in South Korea.
This article discusses some of the impact that the exhibition has had on its viewers and the photographers. It concludes by suggesting how a study of prostitution ''minus the sex'' could point to new avenues of sexuality studies.
This article examines the paradoxes of neoliberalism through two migrant sex workers' negotiation of the transnational disciplinary regimes of morality, national security, and humanitarianism. We take as our point of departure their active resistance to the label of " victims of sex trafficking.
