Theorizing Sex Workers’ Agency

From the anti-prostitution campaigns of the late nineteenth century up to the George W. Bush administration’s international campaign against sex trafficking, the dominant view of prostitution is that it entails exploitation of hapless, usually female, victims. Vulnerable women and girls are coerced, manipulated, and tricked into sex work by male pimps, traffickers, and johns. These exploiters prey on poor and indebted women and girls, who are often already victims of trauma and abuse even before entering sex work. From the viewpoint of this hegemonic narrative, very few (if any) sex workers truly choose voluntarily to enter into sex work. Even when sex workers report that they have chosen this work, this is likely a symptom of false consciousness, a sign of how completely they have been manipulated by their abusers.

This victim narrative has been used to fuel what Grant terms the “rescue industry”: ^{Footnote 4} religious and secular NGOs, as well as journalists, politicians, and police who seek to save victims of prostitution—often through the use of force and punitive measures. These victimized women must be rescued from their pimps and brothels—whether by religious organizations promising salvation for fallen women, or by police and secular organizations hoping to give them alternatives. But there is usually a cost for non-compliance. Those sex workers who are so manipulated that when given the opportunity they do not choose to leave prostitution are often subject to criminal charges, or to forcible reform, being confined to rescue institutions for their own good.

The obvious counter-narrative to the exploitation view of sex work is the one that emerged in the sex wars: that many sex workers choose freely to engage in sex work, and that this work is empowering to them. Sex work, in the classic view articulated by activist groups like COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), is work just like any other work; it is not intrinsically exploitative or oppressive—at least no more so than other forms of wage labor. It is patronizing and condescending to assume that sex workers are incapable of making free choices. Some might choose to engage in sex work because it offers higher pay or better working conditions than other forms of available labor; others might choose to engage in it because they find it enjoyable, exciting, or rewarding as an outlet for personal expression. Whatever the reasons, sex workers should be entitled to the same consideration as other workers: they should be viewed as capable of making their own choices about their lives.

Yet the empowerment narrative is weak as a response to the hegemonic exploitation narrative for several reasons. First, it does not undermine the rescuers’ claim that any woman who believes she has freely chosen to engage in sex work is actually the victim of false consciousness. Second, while some sex workers claim that sex work is empowering, many others (some of whom have formed rescue organizations) claim the opposite: it cannot be true that sex work is always and only empowering. Third, to adopt this view is to be forced to suppress any negative experiences sex workers may have. Valerie Feldman demonstrates this in her analysis of the sex worker blog Bound, Not Gagged (co-founded by Grant). As one commenter wrote, “believe me I have stories. After twenty years, you bet your ass I do. I choose to keep those stories away from the public. We have many enemies and although at times it could be cathartic for me personally, any of those stories will only further the oppression against us.” ^{Footnote 5} The empowerment narrative therefore encourages sex workers to represent an inauthentic view of their working conditions and to suppress any complaints they might have. ^{Footnote 6}

One alternative to the exploitation/empowerment dichotomy proposed by some of the authors under review is to diversify representations of sex workers in academic research, in advocacy, and in the media. This diversification arises in response to a common approach among critics of sex work who take one particular segment of the sex worker population as representative of the whole: typically, street workers or victims of sex trafficking. ^{Footnote 7} It is easy to treat all sex work as exploitative when the only sex workers visible in studies, policy papers, and media reports are those who are most vulnerable and least likely to have chosen their work. By diversifying representations of sex workers, the conflation of all sex work with street work or trafficking may be contested. In this spirit, Alexandra Lutnick reports on the SWEAT (Sex Worker Environmental Assessment Team) study, which used innovative methods to recruit participants from a wide variety of types of sex work. ^{Footnote 8} This study revealed that this diverse group of sex workers in the Bay Area also hold a range of views on the politics of sex work, ranging from the belief that it should be criminalized to the view that it should be legalized. ^{Footnote 9} Both in terms of its subject population and in terms of the results of the study itself, SWEAT offered empirical proof of the limitations of the exploitation narrative. Many of the articles collected in Negotiating Sex Work similarly stress the variety of types of sex work, the many different reasons why women and others will enter into sex work, and the different views that sex workers hold. The virtue of this approach is that it enables sex worker activists and researchers to acknowledge that some sex workers are exploited, without therefore conceding that all sex workers must be. ^{Footnote 10} Nonetheless, this approach risks reinforcing the exploitation/empowerment divide, reinscribing it in terms of either types of sex work (street-based versus indoors) or pathways into sex work (trafficked/coerced versus freely chosen).

A more promising approach to theorizing the agency of sex workers is suggested provocatively by Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic in the introduction to their edited volume. This is the view that agents are never either complete victims, nor completely free to determine their actions. Rather, agents are always both constrained and enabled by structure. As Showden and Majic put it, agency is “a capacity relative to different structural positions people occupy and a way of negotiating structures.” ^{Footnote 11} Thus, even the most vulnerable and exploited of sex workers retain agency and can never be fully deprived of it: the structural constraints on their action may vary, but their capacity to negotiate structure does not. Rather than rescuing “victims” of sex work, on this view, we should seek to understand the structures that constrain and enable sex workers’ agency. Once we start looking for agency among groups we had assumed were mere victims, these books promise, we will notice all sorts of creative expressions of agency among sex workers.

For example, Remick recounts a strike by brothel workers in Guangzhou in 1926. Prostitutes in that city were incentivized to organize and act like any other workers because their work was heavily taxed by the city government: because of these local regulations, they had the leverage to use a strike to gain concessions. ^{Footnote 12} Majic and Samantha Beer and Francine Tremblay show how the U.S. and Canadian governments’ interests in addressing the AIDS epidemic created opportunities for sex workers’ organizations to gain funding from state agencies. These service organizations, through entrepreneurial grant writing, have been able to sustain themselves longer than many sex worker activist groups, while also maintaining a radical political orientation that treats sex work as like any other work. ^{Footnote 13} In Thailand, Edith Kinney argues, rescue organizations have overlooked the agency of the women in the brothels they seek to save: in particular, by assuming that all sex workers are trafficked or coerced, they have missed how some women in these brothels are working voluntarily and serve as resources to help women who have been trafficked to escape. By raiding brothels and treating all sex workers as victims, the rescue industry in Thailand has actually been removing “voluntary workers who may have developed strategies that can assist trafficked persons.” ^{Footnote 14}

Grant’s book, Playing the Whore, offers the most explicitly political turn to look at how sex workers’ agency relates to structure. She is a journalist and former sex worker, and of the four books, hers is the one most addressed to a popular audience. Her book offers analysis of the rescue industry, dominant narratives about sex work (which she terms the “prostitute imaginary”), ^{Footnote 15} and criticism of how supposed “debates” about sex work take place in the United States (largely without the participation of sex worker activists). The crux of her impassioned argument, though, is that the exploitation/empowerment dichotomy distracts us from examining “the systemic forces constraining workers’ power, on the job and off.” ^{Footnote 16} Her use of the term “worker” rather than “sex worker” is intentional: she insists that there are important continuities “between the mainstream and sex economies.” Getting rid of sex work would do nothing to address “the fundamental inequities of the rest of the economy.” ^{Footnote 17} As she puts it, “if we take the naked girl out of the picture in Playboy or on Page 3, it does nothing to free any of us from the constraints on women’s actual sexual lives, on our power.” ^{Footnote 18} Sex work is just like any other work, which means that the politics of sex work should have the same focus as the politics of work: the economic structures that make survival sex necessary, and the limitations on autonomy in the mainstream workplace that render much service work unattractive to the women who are often slotted into it. ^{Footnote 19}

The analytic value of the more nuanced understanding of agency that underlies these various turns to interrogate structure is that it allows researchers to resist the patronizing narrative of victimization, and instead identify agency in its myriad creative forms. By shifting our attention to structural factors affecting sex workers, this move also has the political value of inviting solidarity between sex worker activists and allies, and those working in other social movements who share a concern to redress structural inequalities. The political limitation of this approach, however, is that it does not easily reduce to a soundbite; it is difficult to see how effective activists and researchers can be at displacing the simplistic narrative of exploitation with a much more complicated view among the media, policy makers, and activists. But this is a battle worth fighting.

Analyzing Policies on Sex Work

The cumulative effect of reading these four books together is a sense of the futility of attempting to devise a policy on sex work that could eliminate sexual exploitation—let alone one that could also recognize and protect the rights of those who voluntarily engage in sex work. The authors explore a wide variety of related policies—contemporary and historic—and yet no author is able to fully endorse any set of laws or regulations that has actually been implemented. Rather, in line with Michel Foucault’s insights, they show how every new exercise of state power simply produces subjects of power in new ways.

There are three broad policy options that have been debated and implemented with regard to sex work. The first is abolition: an approach that aims at the eventual elimination of prostitution as a practice, on the grounds that sex work is fundamentally exploitative. Some abolitionist policies aim at restricting or criminalizing the supply of sex work: these include laws such as those in most of the United States declaring the exchange of sex for money a criminal offense. Other abolitionist policies aim at restricting or criminalizing the demand for sex work. Most notably, Sweden in 1999 criminalized the purchase of sex. This policy approach, often referred to as the Swedish model, is justified on the grounds that prostitution is gendered exploitation of women by men. ^{Footnote 20} It has been adopted in Norway as well, and is being considered for adoption in other countries.

The second approach is decriminalization: removing all laws and regulations that criminalize sex work. This kind of policy allows people to engage in sex work without fear of arrest, but does not involve any active intervention by the state in the regulation and protection of sex workers. This approach was adopted by New Zealand, where the government has left municipalities the authority to regulate brothels, but without direct intervention of its own. ^{Footnote 21} It was also expressed in Proposition K, a failed ballot initiative in San Francisco in 2008 that would have effectively decriminalized sex work by preventing the police from enforcing laws against prostitution.

The third approach is legalization: affirmatively making sex work the subject of legal regulation or protection. This is the policy in some parts of Australia, Nevada, and most notably the Netherlands, which legalized voluntary sex work in 1999. Legalization policies include licensing and taxation for sex work businesses (brothels, strip clubs, massage parlors), and sometimes also the registration of individual sex workers. Historically, legalization has also often been accompanied by mandatory health checkups and STI testing for sex workers.

Regulating Prostitution in China usefully details three different legalization regimes in different cities in China in the early twentieth century. Remick claims that scholars cannot fully grasp the process of statebuilding in China without understanding the role the regulation of prostitution played in the development (or non-development) of institutions at the municipal level in this period. She offers valuable and fascinating detail about each of her three cases, explaining the political history, geography, and practices of sex work in each city. Hangzhou represents the “light regulatory approach”: prostitution, while legal, was regulated by the police. Sex workers had to register with the authorities, they were taxed (albeit lightly), they were only allowed to practice in certain areas of town, and they were subjected to health examinations for signs of STIs. ^{Footnote 22} Guangzhou represents the “revenue-intensive” approach: sex workers and brothels were much more heavily taxed, generating a significant revenue stream for the city, allowing it to engage in more extensive statebuilding than other municipalities. The higher tax rates were welcomed by the brothels because it “made them less vulnerable to prosecution or police harassment.” ^{Footnote 23} Finally, Kunming represents the “coercion-intensive” approach: brothels here were at times run directly by the police, and at other times run privately, but still subject to police oversight. ^{Footnote 24} Prostitutes were subject to a great deal of disciplinary control, even being confined to brothels and only allowed to leave for a few hours at a time. This policy regime also resulted in “revenues that subsidized the growth of the city government,” although to a lesser extent than in Guangzhou. ^{Footnote 25} All three cities shared a peculiar state-sponsored institution: the jiliangsuo, a secular prostitute rescue center intended to give women a means of escaping sex work, which was accompanied by varying degrees of financial investment depending on the legalization regime. ^{Footnote 26}

While this book will mostly be of interest to scholars of China’s political development and historians of prostitution, in the epilogue Remick briefly reflects on the implications of her study for contemporary debates over sex work policy. She notes that the contemporary debates over abolition, decriminalization, and legalization all have strong historical precedents, in China and elsewhere. She warns that “these old arguments keep resurfacing because the ‘problem’ of prostitution has not been ‘solved’ by any of the methods governments have attempted over the past hundred or more years.” In particular, she cautions against thinking—as many sex worker activists and allies today do—that legalization will be a “panacea.” ^{Footnote 27} The regulation of prostitution in China had various ill effects: from state endorsement of and even participation in coercing women into sex work, to limiting the freedom and privacy of prostitutes, to failing to address sex workers’ health. Playing off of Winston Churchill, she ruefully concludes that legalization “is the worst method of dealing with prostitution except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” ^{Footnote 28}

What Remick fails to appreciate, and what the other three books show, is that the political climate regarding sex work policy has shifted significantly over the past century. In particular, the 1970s sparked the first sex worker activist groups. International, national, and local organizations now operate around the globe, advocating for sex workers’ rights and improved working conditions—with admittedly varying degrees of success in being taken seriously as partners in the policy-making process. Could legalization today prove more effective than it was in the past, with the inclusion of sex workers in the design and implementation of laws and regulations?

The answer proffered by the essays collected in Negotiating Sex Work is … possibly. This collection is divided into three sections: one on research methods, one on policy analysis, and one on sex worker activism. While the essays on methodology are replete with calls for the inclusion of a wide range of sex workers in the process of conducting research, with an eye towards having an impact on policy formation, the essays on policy analysis are much more cautious about the potential impact of activists on policy. These latter essays cover a wide range of contemporary policy regimes, but they give the impression that (as Remick would predict) every policy has negative consequences for at least some sex workers. The most striking chapter in this respect is the one on the Netherlands, which is often viewed as the most permissive and progressive nation when it comes to prostitution. But Joyce Outshoorn reveals how the decriminalization of prostitution in 1999 has actually produced negative outcomes for sex workers by legalizing “voluntary sex work” performed by EU citizens only. ^{Footnote 29} By criminalizing “forced prostitution,” and aligning it with non-EU sex workers, the law obscures that Dutch and European women can also be subject to coercion and trafficking (a reality brought to light in 2008 with the prosecution of a trafficking gang whose victims were all from the EU). ^{Footnote 30} Conversely, the law obscures that non-European women may voluntary migrate to Europe in order to engage in sex work. The Dutch policy actually enables exploitation of these voluntary migrants by refusing to grant them work permits, thereby rendering them vulnerable to exploitation by managers who threaten them with deportation. This is not an incidental effect of the law; rather Outshoorn argues, “policy actually creates these working conditions.” ^{Footnote 31} A law that originally aimed at legitimating voluntary sex work has the perverse result of obscuring and even enabling the very exploitation it sought to end.

Regardless of whether they aim at abolition, decriminalization, or legalization, sex work policies all have the effect of benefiting some sex workers while harming others. It may not be possible to escape this dilemma. However, we can rule out two kinds of policies: those that treat all sex work as the same (e.g., as street walking), and those that treat all sex workers as the same (e.g., as coerced or trafficked). What Negotiating Sex Work offers us is not a blueprint, but a method for policy-making: include a variety of sex workers at every stage of policy formulation and implementation. This cannot simply entail including the voices of sex workers’ rights advocates. It has to mean—as Showden and Majic aspire to do with their collection—taking into account the varied experiences (positive and negative) of sex workers, including of those who would not self-identify as sex workers and those who do not want to do sex work. Taking sex workers into account is about taking their views seriously—not as the only relevant views for policy-making, but as important views to be considered in their variety. Input from a diverse group of sex workers increases the likelihood that we will anticipate the more egregious consequences of proposed policies on certain groups, and can give policy-makers greater insight into the structural conditions in which sex workers act. This approach to policy-making entails viewing sex workers as agents, capable of valuable insight into their own working conditions.

Assessing Sex Worker Activism

While the appearance of these four books in a single year is a sign of burgeoning interest in sex workers’ rights, it is also reason for a careful reassessment of the movement. Unlike other radical social movements that burst forth in the 1970s, the sex workers’ movement has relatively few successes to celebrate. Sex work is still largely criminalized around the globe. The social stigma against sex work remains strong, even in communities that have decriminalized or legalized. What has become of the movement?

This question is in a way at the center of Majic’s book, Sex Work Politics. While the title promises an exploration of political activism, it is instead an exploration of a narrower question plaguing social movement scholars: do radical politics become coopted when movement activists accept state funding to support their organizations? Majic’s response, counter to the grain of the social movement literature, is an emphatic no. She worked for and studied two organizations providing health services to sex workers in the Bay Area, both of which grew out of COYOTE’s activism: CAL-PEP, the California Prostitutes Education Project; and SJI, the St. James Infirmary (named after COYOTE founder Margo St. James). Both groups receive funding from a variety of local, state, and federal agencies that restrict their ability as registered non-profits to engage in political advocacy. Yet Majic emphatically argues that this has not forced them to compromise their radical anti-abolitionist views, nor has it rendered their members incapable of engaging in political action altogether.

Majic perceptively notices three ways in which both organizations remain politically active, through what she terms oppositional implementation, community engagement, and claims-making activities. She finds that these groups have found creative ways to operate in an abolitionist political environment without abandoning their radical views—in particular by capitalizing on governments’ interests in addressing the AIDS epidemic through targeting populations believed to be at higher risk of infection. Both groups were able to win HIV/AIDS related grants in part because they were willing to work directly with a hard to reach and underserved group: marginalized sex workers. ^{Footnote 32}

While Majic offers a compelling argument and an insider’s detailed view of how both organizations and their leadership negotiate the constraints of non-profit status, she overstates her case by labeling what CAL-PEP and SJI do as sex work politics. While their work is clearly motivated by their political commitments, and while the organizations may produce studies that can be used to lobby for and support sex-worker-friendly policy, both groups are prevented by non-profit law from directly engaging in any significant political organizing. Instead of energizing and mobilizing sex workers and their allies to engage in collective action, the effects of these groups are much more indirect. Majic describes them as creating “habitats” and “an open environment” in which sex workers are treated with respect and nonjudgment. ^{Footnote 33} While she claims that these spaces can be “indirectly politicizing” (sex workers might meet while waiting in the community room at SJI and start talking politics), there is no necessary connection between receiving health services and HIV testing from one of these groups and becoming involved in a sex workers’ social movement. ^{Footnote 34} Indeed the examples she gives of such transformation are of individuals deciding to become more involved in politics, although not necessarily movement politics.

The most directly political action that she describes is a public awareness campaign designed and implemented by SJI in 2011. The campaign involved photographs of a variety of people, with the tagline “Someone you know is a sex worker.” ^{Footnote 35} These posters are indeed radical in their portrayal of sex workers as human beings deserving of respect, and in their portrayal of the diversity of sex workers. This is a campaign that aims to go beyond empowering individuals through acceptance and nonjudgment, and instead seeks to combat the social stigma that generates the exploitation narrative and feeds the criminalization of sex work.

Given that this is the most clearly radical political project Majic describes either group undertaking, I wonder whether the issue with these non-profits is not so much that they have been coopted by an abolitionist government, as that they have been neoliberalized (along with other radical social movements). Change is to be had primarily through therapeutic means, working on empowering one individual at a time; or through bureaucratic means, proving empirically that peer-provided health services reduce risky sexual behavior and drug use. Yet this therapeutic model of providing localized habitats and open environments, and research like the SWEAT study seem entirely inadequate to addressing the structural issues that Majic herself and other researchers show drive many people to become sex workers, and also condition their abuse and exploitation. Here, Grant’s uncompromising call for sex workers’ rights as human rights is an important reminder of what a radical political vision might look like.

Bringing Gender Back In

SJI’s public awareness campaign is notable for taking the whore stigma head on. And yet, as is characteristic of the books under review here, this stigma is acknowledged, but not analyzed in terms of gender. Many of the authors mention their feminist commitments, or note the gendering of the stigma against sex work (and how women especially are vulnerable to being viewed as prostitutes, even when they are not sex workers), yet none of them reflects directly on gender itself as an important structural feature of sex work. On the contrary, these books exhibit a general reluctance to think critically about gender.

Of all the authors, Remick most explicitly writes about sex work in terms of gender, claiming that “prostitution as it was practiced in late Qing and Republican China was highly gendered, and many aspects of its practice are only comprehensible if we put them in the larger context of gender relations.” ^{Footnote 36} She notes that the consumption of sex work was a way for men to demonstrate their “proper” masculinity, whereas women’s production of sex work demonstrated that they were not “good women.” ^{Footnote 37} While she attends to the gendering of sex work, Remick’s purpose in doing so is primarily descriptive rather than critical. Nonetheless, the connections she draws between gender and sex work in a historical setting can prompt us as readers to ask important questions about the gender politics of sex work, policy, and activism today.

Sex work is a deeply gendered kind of work: it is overwhelmingly performed by women and transwomen. The consumption of sex work is also gendered: those who purchase sexual services are overwhelmingly men. Sex work often involves the selling of gendered fantasies (albeit a variety of them). If sex work is work like any other, then we should ask whether this gendered division of labor is just. This gendering of sex work is what led proponents of the Swedish model to declare that “prostitution is one of the most extreme consequences of man’s domination and women’s subordination.” ^{Footnote 38} Supporters of sex workers’ rights should have a more compelling response to this charge than to complain, as Grant does, that the Swedish law “was undertaken without any meaningful consultation with women who sell sex.” ^{Footnote 39} Including female sex workers in the policy-making process might produce more sensitive laws, and it might give some politicians the opportunity to view at least some sex workers as agents, rather than as mere victims—but it would do nothing to alter the gendering of sex work itself. Can the gendering of sex work be defended? Is gendered sex work compatible with gender equality? Are there kinds of sex work that are more problematic because they involve practices that reinforce gender inequality? Are there kinds of sex work that are less problematic because they involve practices that challenge or transform normative gender roles?

We should also think critically about the gendering involved in different policies regulating sex work. Abolitionist policies, figuring sex workers as exploited victims, set up the state and the rescue industry as what Iris Young has termed “masculinist protectors”: the chivalrous, “good” men who protect women from exploitation by rapacious, “bad” men. ^{Footnote 40} Yet policies of legalization are no less gendered, just differently so. Regulating sex work sets up the state as the arbiter of gender norms, deciding which sex workers are “good women” deserving of protection, and which sex workers are “bad women” deserving of punishment. Remick reveals this logic in its basest form in Kunming, where unregistered prostitutes detained by the police were assigned “based on their age and beauty” to a particular class of prostitution, then confined to work in brothels run by the state. ^{Footnote 41} Is it possible to implement a gender-neutral policy on sex work, one that does not implicate the state in adopting a gendered role, and one that does not effectively grant the state authority to regulate and determine gender norms? Could decriminalization be such a gender-neutral approach? Or is decriminalization simply a way for the state to leave gender norms in place and unchallenged? Can the state regulate sex work without also regulating gender, or are the two fundamentally inseparable?

A final set of questions we could ask have to do with the gendering of sex worker activism. Majic insists that SJI and CAL-PEP have not been coopted by receiving state funds—but have they been feminized? The shift away from the radical activism of COYOTE and towards nonjudgmental service provision could be understood as a shift away from the “masculine” activities of political advocacy and confrontational protest, toward the “feminine” activities of caring for others and producing bureaucratic paperwork to ensure a steady flow of grant money. Has the radicalism of the sex workers’ movement been domesticated not by the state, but by a turn away from advocacy towards pink-collar service work?

Even when these sex work scholars note the gendering of sex work, policy, and activism, they do not take their analysis a step further by exploring these kinds of critical questions. As I suggested at the outset, they seem reluctant to do so in large part because of the longstanding association among sex workers and their allies of gendered analysis of sex work with abolitionism. Even as these authors reject the idea that sex work is wholly empowering, they nonetheless aim at empowering sex workers through the production of research characterized by inclusion and nonjudgment. Gender analysis, however, seems to raise the specter of judgment by implying that some are victims and some are perpetrators of gender inequality. Interestingly enough, these same authors do not hesitate to highlight other structural inequalities that affect sex workers, such as class and race inequality, nationality and immigration status, sexuality and trans identity. Only gender inequality seems to be taboo.

The impact of the omission of gender analysis is exacerbated by a lopsided rethinking of sex worker agency in this literature. Recall that Majic and Showden encourage their readers to view sex worker agency as complex, beyond the binaries of exploitation and empowerment. Yet they do not call for a corresponding revisioning of structure to complement this nuanced account of agency. Consequently, structure seems to function in Negotiating Sex Work as a given: it is the more or less static context that sex workers negotiate as agents, not a feature of their lives that could be radically transformed. Yasmin Lalani’s contribution on sex worker HIV/AIDS education in Peru illustrates this well. She describes how sex workers in Iquitos negotiate gender norms that associate masculinity with unprotected and nonmonogamous sex. ^{Footnote 42} Lalani explains how some sex workers engage in “protest femininity”—refusing the passive role of accepting their clients’ wishes to have sex without condoms, and insisting on protection. As a result, they are able to “challenge their [male clients’] masculine beliefs about condom use.” ^{Footnote 43} She thereby shows how sex workers have agency within the narrow confines of gender norms in the Peruvian Amazon: they can choose between being passive and being assertive about safer sex. While I certainly do not mean to dismiss the importance of this exercise of agency, I am troubled by the narrowness of vision it represents. An individual sex worker rejects unprotected sex, but in doing so leaves in place the whole gendered, raced, and classed edifice of sex work in Iquitos. Adopting a more complicated theory of agency as negotiating within existing structures seems to lead many of these authors to lower their expectations of the degree of structural transformation sex worker activism can hope to achieve.

Bringing gender back in to critical analysis on sex work need not lead us to an abolitionist stance; it can, and it should, lead us to think more radically about the kind of structural transformations that would be necessary in order for sex work to be just. A gendered perspective on sex work might lead one to acknowledge the agency of the sex worker in Iquitos who insists on condom usage, but it would never allow one to be satisfied with this kind of incremental change. As Grant writes, “dwelling on the individual capacity for empowerment does little to help uncover the systemic forces constraining worker’s power, on the job and off.” ^{Footnote 44} Including gender among the systematic forces to be uncovered through critical analysis could prove both a useful tool against abolitionists who deploy gender in order to criminalize and stigmatize sex work, and a catalyst to spur sex workers and their allies to imagine a radically different world, to be achieved not through incremental acts of individual agency, but through the collective action of a visionary movement.