Research

My dissertation, Sex Worker Activism and the Regulatory Liminality of Rights, examines sex workers’ governance strategies, showing how sex workers use informal advocacy networks to secure rights and combat criminality and stigma. I develop the concept of regulatory liminality to describe the ambiguous status of sex work in socio-political environments. Sex Worker Activism analyzes the impact of regulatory liminality on sex workers’ advocacy in the US, UK, and Australia. Most centrally, this project contends that although sex workers’ networks of care look very different from top-down governance, and although they usually occur within contained spaces – from brothels to neighborhoods – the tactics they forge there are scaled up to enact broader social and systemic change. I analyze sex workers’ governance strategies to argue that their informal advocacy networks create alternatives to state-centric pathways of rights while combating criminalization. Through interviews and participant observation, my dissertation reveals how sex workers utilize informal and formal care practices. I compare sex workers organizational strategies across different regulatory environments by comparing the three distinct contexts of the US, UK, and Australia. In each case, I trace how informal activist practices are often entangled with formal pathways toward rights recognition. 

 

My research makes an original contribution to the literature on human rights and global governance of labor rights by analyzing how sex workers’ informal social practices disrupt and alter existing legal relationships. I argue that sex workers offer new strategies to alleviate state violence in a world increasingly characterized by declining democracy and threats to human rights. By centering sex workers as experts, I also disrupt long-held beliefs around who is able to generate social scientific knowledge.