Money, Agency, and Self-Care among Cisgender and Trans People in Sex Work

Treena Orchard, Katherine Salter, Mary Bunch and Cecilia Benoit
Additional contact information
Treena Orchard: School of Health Studies, Western University, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada
Katherine Salter: Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B2N 5E3, Canada
Mary Bunch: Department of Cinema and Media Arts, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
Cecilia Benoit: Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada

Social Sciences, 2020, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Many qualitative studies about the exchange of sex for money, drugs, and less tangible outcomes (i.e., social status) contend that this activity contributes to high levels of internalized stigma among people in sex work. The cis (n = 33) and trans people (n = 5) who participated in our project about health, violence, and social services acknowledged the stigma associated with sex work but were not governed by the dominant discourse about its moral stain. They shared nuanced insights about the relationship between sex work and self-respect as people who use their earnings to mitigate the struggles of poverty and ongoing drug use, and care for themselves more broadly. This study sheds new light on the ways that cis and trans people negotiate issues of money, agency, and self-care, contributing to the literature on consensual sex work that examines different aspects of stigma, safety, and health with a nuanced, non-binary gender analysis.

Keywords: sex work; money; agency; self-care; gender; transgender; subjectivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/1/6/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/1/6/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:10:y:2020:i:1:p:6-:d:470090

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().