The field of prostitution and sex work studies has seen, in the past decade in particular, a significant expansion to which both these books—a collection edited by Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic, and a monograph also by Samantha Majic—make important contributions. They provide empirically rich accounts framed in disciplinary perspectives that have explored sex work and the sex industry more traditionally, including sociology, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and less commonly, such as political science, industrial relations, and sociolegal studies. Both books work successfully in challenging the prevailing tendency in this field of research and policy making to produce and reproduce simplistic understandings of sex work. They do so by laying out the complexity of the latter and by stressing the need for a model of knowledge production that reflects more critically on how data on the sex industry are collected and made sense of.

Negotiating Sex Work uses theoretical and empirical arguments to challenge victim-centric representations of those who operate in the sex industry and to emphasize sex workers’ agency in their complex daily negotiations of the social, economic, and political forces that contribute to their marginalization. The authors undertake these tasks by focusing on three perspectives: first, through an exploration of the politics of knowledge production in the field (Part I: Sex Work and the Politics of Knowledge Production); second, by examining different ways in which public policies adopt narrow categories for understanding sex workers (Part II: Producing the Sex Worker: Law, Politics, and Unintended Consequences); lastly, by looking at how sex workers organize to challenge exclusionary law and policies and advance, not without difficulties, their collective claims (Part III: Negotiating Status: The Promises and Limits of Sex Worker Organizing). One slight quibble is that the subtitle of the collection, Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism, conveys a narrower focus than the broader and more ambitious scope of the contributions organized around these three analytical dimensions.

The three chapters in Part I (a pity that this section is the one with lesser contributions) present much-needed reflections on the methodological choices, difficulties, and limitations of doing sex work research. Chapter 1 discusses the unexpected impacts research on sex work had on the authors’ personal and professional lives, eliciting their renegotiations on how to make sense of the ways in which sexuality and sexual subjectivities are variously and continuously reshaped in the field. Drawing on empirical studies conducted in San Francisco and Vancouver, respectively, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 make a case for the inclusivity of participatory research approaches, which integrate sex workers in the entire research process. While not shunning away from outlining the demanding challenges that these methods entail, both chapters conclude convincingly by stressing their merits.

The second and lengthiest part of the collection on sex work policies and politics begins with a chapter on the British context, specifically on New Labour's shifting approach to prostitution in the first decade of the 2000s. Annie Hill calls it a “sympathetic shift” toward prostitutes—an ambiguous sympathy that reproduced an unfruitful and still pervasive binary construction that sees, on one hand, the reformable and thus acceptable prostitute and, on the other, the recalcitrant and thus criminalized one. Chapter 5 is devoted to licensing bylaws that afflict sex workers in Canada. With its analysis of the often unintended effects of local-level policies, the chapter sheds light on the need for research that looks at what actually happens on the ground when laws and policies are put into practice. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, the author argues that these local-level policies rely on the construction of prostitutes as “ugly bodies” whose regulation serves to reinforce and maintain a normative and exclusionary moral and social order. The involvement of sex workers in policy making, at local and other levels, is suggested as an urgent way of overcoming such detrimental assumptions. With a focus on Brazil, the excellent Chapter 6 discusses ways in which hegemonic narratives on trafficking and related antitrafficking policies operate in a migrant sex worker's “sending country”—a perspective less explored in scholarship in the field—to create a problematic, racialized, and classed dichotomy. On one hand are the responsible, dignified migrants whose movements, national or transnational, are endorsed and granted a level of respectability. On the other are those identified as vulnerable and whose migration is discouraged or even deliberately impeded for the sake of salvaging the country's honor and reputation. Chapter 7 focuses on the rhetoric and politics of the “war on human trafficking” in Thailand. The author advances the proposition that this well-intentioned war is enacted in a crime-control framework, which is permeated by a masculinized and militarized culture that, in turn, undermines the rights and security of those it purports to protect. This represents yet another example of the unintended effects of policies underpinned by ill-formulated concepts and ambiguous objectives.

The remaining contributions of this part of the collection bring us to Europe. Joyce Outshoorn's Chapter 8 presents a detailed analysis of recent shifting prostitution policies in the Netherlands and considers the hierarchical and differentially exclusionary categories of prostitutes they reproduce. Dutch and EU legal sex workers are constructed as agentic and assertive and entitled to some (but still very much restricted) social rights; whereas those from outside the EU are approached mostly as trafficked prostitutes and illegal migrants who are entitled to no rights or protection. In Chapter 9 the authors explore the questions of how and why Sweden implemented the criminalization of the purchase of sexual services, whereas Finland did not. Which ideas were most relevant in informing the different policy outcomes in the two countries? One of the answers, it is argued, was in the difference in emphasis put on gender equality, which was prominent in Sweden, but not so much in Finland. The authors also stress how entrepreneurs capitalize on the social and cultural value of particular ideas to promote their policies, as opposed to basing them on careful analysis and evidence of the phenomenon addressed—a point that fittingly applies to prostitution policy making.

The final section of the book on sex work organizing starts with Chapter 10′s exploration of how sex workers advance economic and workplace demands collectively as workers. Despite the many difficulties in achieving this, Gregor Gall claims that sex workers in different contexts around the world have been, and continue to imaginatively experiment with, “multiple forms of independent collectivism and interest representation” to build “their capacity to create leverage over clients, operators and regulators” (224). Chapter 11 presents the value of virtual engagements by discussing how a community sex-worker activist blog has been used successfully as a tool for political mobilization, dialogue, and as a “mouthpiece for the movement” (244). No new entry had been logged for over a year when I checked the blog—perhaps not a sign of its demise but rather more likely of the time and dedication needed to keep these instruments alive and regularly updated. Chapter 12 continues the discussion about sex work activism by looking at sex worker organizations’ collective claims in the Peruvian context. The discussion reveals tensions and ambiguities in the definition of what counts as sex work by those who operate in it, complicating the provisions offered by local NGOs. The final contribution of the collection, Chapter 13, investigates what happens when marginalized political groups accept and make use of governmental funding. In the case study explored, that of Stella, the Montreal-based sex worker organization, the authors claim that the use of state funds has ultimately been enabling to the organization and to the advancement of its goals.

In Samantha Majic's Sex Work Politics, we gain a deep insight into CAL-PEP, the California Prostitute Education Project that offers “HIV/AIDS prevention and education services to sex workers and members of other street-based populations” (1), and the San Francisco-based St. James Infirmary (SJI), the “world's only occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers” (1). Majic explains that these are both examples of social movement-born nonprofit organizations—that is, they are created by activists who take advantage of various resources, including state funds, to offer service provisions while continuing their involvement in oppositional politics. The author looks at the opportunities offered and limitations imposed by laws and rules on nonprofit organizations, as well as the broader sociocultural, political, and “ideational institutional structures that shape dominant societal and political understandings of prostitution” (7).

More specifically, Majic discusses the ways in which these Californian organizations continued to be effective in providing spaces and services for marginalized communities in constantly altering and oppositional political and economic climates. The claim that the necessary compromises that had to be made to survive in these times have reduced the possibility for political action and the advancement of sex workers’ demands is carefully addressed, and ultimately challenged. Majic concedes that there are limitations imposed by institutional rules of collaboration, including nonprofits’ agreement to be scrutinized by government agencies in a political climate adverse to noncriminalizing approaches to prostitution. However, “cooperation is not synonymous with cooptation” (34), and the opportunities to promote radical ideas and challenge state policy are not lost. Indeed they have been and can be strategically utilized and made the most of by those who have learned to operate in and with the system.

Drawing theoretically from “new institutionalism,” Majic's discussion of the dynamic encounters between the state and the two organizations, the strategies they adopted to collaborate while maintaining capacity for resistance, and the difficulties encountered in doing so, could have been rather dry. And I feared this while reading the introduction, where the theoretical framework of the book is outlined. On the contrary, the following chapters on oppositional implementation, community engagement, community activity, and lessons learned present a vivid and engaging account of how these processes take place concretely, in the day-to-day work of those who operate in and benefit from these organizations. Majic's rich ethnographic data make their stories and experiences come alive.

These accounts reveal that efforts to build and sustain these institutions while maintaining political commitments and creating a safe environment for a marginalized population are not an easy feat. To continue their activities successfully, both organizations had to find ways of staying away from more radical broader political demands, such as the advancement of the rights of sex workers, to focus more effectively, for example, on the rights of sex workers to obtain condoms without fear of being arrested. In order to be able to do this, the need to be flexible is emphasized, especially in times of political obscurantism. The example of the negative climate introduced by the Bush administration is a case in point. During this time, having changed the meaning of the P in CAL-PEP from “prostitution” to “prevention,”—that is, the California Prevention Education Project, worked to the advantage of the organization, which managed not to be defunded and continued its work. Later, the meaning of the P went back to the original “prostitution,” a strategy that served well to emphasize the uniqueness of the services provided by the California Prostitution Education Project and attract valuable grants.

The complex and demanding politics of funding is also an aspect that emerges from the discussion, especially concerning the difficulty of investing time and energy in serving a marginalized community, while collecting data to satisfy funders’ requirements and supporting the professionalization of grant-writing staff. The many different ways in which claims-making activities are advanced in the midst of all these other demanding tasks shed light on the strategic and political acumen of those leading these organizations. By producing research to “influence and inform the public and policy makers” (96), they bolster their expert status and find ways of legitimately carrying out policy advocacy through individual and permitted lobbying initiatives.

The breadth of issues presented in both the collection and the monograph and the ways in which negotiations of sex work and sex work politics are explored in their complexity provide a valuable addition in this field of study. They invite us to think beyond reductionist representations and understandings of sex work and to investigate more carefully the multifariousness of its dimensions and of the lives of those variously involved in it. It should be noted that the contexts analyzed in these works, with the exception of Peru and, to a certain extent, Brazil, are the ones that tend to be commonly explored and presented in international research and publications on sex work. Rather than being a limitation of the books, this reveals the uneven expansion of scholarship in sex work and prostitution studies across the globe. It is works like these that build and give visibility to a subject of research that remains itself too often stigmatized, in and beyond academia.