Sex work

Nicola Smith

Chapter 45 in Handbook on Gender in World Politics, 2026, pp 302-305 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Feminists have long highlighted how sex and sexuality are not only political but economic too, with the sex industry serving as both an important case study in its own right and as a site for rethinking global capitalism more widely. This chapter charts these debates, which have often been framed in terms of a dichotomy between commercial sex as the violent commodification of women's sexual selfhood, on the one hand, and as a site of economic agency and sexual freedom, on the other. The chapter then explores efforts to move beyond this binary, including those that explicitly situate sex workers’ struggles alongside those of other workers, as well as queer scholarship that connects the study of commercial sex to the critique of heteronormative power relations under capitalism.

Keywords: Commercial Sex; Sexual Labour; Gendered Political Economy; Heteronormativity; Queer Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803923765
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