Palgrave Advances in Sex Work Studies – serie

This edited collection showcases innovative, up and coming researchers’ work in the field of sex work studies across labour/work and relationships.

This edited collection showcases innovative, up and coming researchers’ work in the field of sex work studies across labour/work and relationships. This research is pushing the boundaries of the subject, asking new questions, carving new methodological terrain, and contributing new ideas and empirical findings to the existing literature. Drawing on sociology, criminology, media studies, social and health policy, law and socio-legal studies, the chapters reflect a range of new topics in the sex work studies literature such as religious readings, porn workers and their interactions with fans; romantic relationships, and humour at work. Studies are drawn from Europe, South America, Turkey, Ireland, New Zealand and the USA. This book speaks to academics across the social sciences and humanities who are interested in sex work studies.

This book provides a contemporary collection of key works that chart new and ongoing terrain on student sex work.

This book provides a contemporary collection of key works that chart new and ongoing terrain on student sex work. It brings together experienced researchers, activists, practitioners, early career researchers and those with lived experience of doing sex work in the university setting from across the globe. The book addresses three core areas: Activism, Ideology and Exclusion; Motivations and Experiences; and University Policy, Practice and Service Delivery. This collection represents significant theoretical, methodological and policy and practice contributions within sex work studies. These new perspectives contribute to our existing knowledge, introduce new directions for scholarship and prompt new and exciting questions about how higher education students’ participation in sex work can be researched, understood and responded to in an ethical, non-stigmatising approach. The book will be of interest to students, researchers and service providers and given the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters, the book has a cross-disciplinary appeal.

It also examines the rules and norms by which operators manage their businesses and the possibilities for sex workers to consent to commercial sexual services in the context of neoliberal norms of work and of managers who expect them to be professionalised, responsibilised and productive.

This book examines the ways that brothels are managed under decriminalisation in New Zealand. New Zealand decriminalised sex work in 2003 with the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act, making it the first country to do so. Decriminalisation situates brothels as ‘businesses like any other’ and creates a legislative platform for better working conditions for sex workers. Nevertheless, we have limited understanding of how brothels are managed in New Zealand. Drawing on interviews with brothel operators and sex workers, this book explores how the law is understood and implemented, how brothel operators position their businesses, and how they seek legitimacy in a historically stigmatised sector. It also examines the rules and norms by which operators manage their businesses and the possibilities for sex workers to consent to commercial sexual services in the context of neoliberal norms of work and of managers who expect them to be professionalised, responsibilised and productive.

This book examines sex worker health and the concept of care among sex workers in Rhode Island using mixed methods research conceived of and led by Ocean State Advocacy (O$A), a grassroots collective of sex workers in Rhode Island.

This book examines sex worker health and the concept of care among sex workers in Rhode Island using mixed methods research conceived of and led by Ocean State Advocacy (O$A), a grassroots collective of sex workers in Rhode Island.

It explores how the interaction between legal consciousness (how people in sex work interpret law, consent, their rights, and how or whether to report), legal norms (legal theory, case rulings, legal codes) and legal practices (what police, lawyers, and judges actually do) affects unwanted contact against sex workers.

This book centers the life histories of three women engaged in sex work in Kolkata, India to show how they make sense of their lived experiences and reveals deep insights into the risks women face in the current social environment of India.

The author also reflects on her journey, transitioning from a researcher and academic to a full-time politician, a transformation that shapes her evolving perspectives on politics throughout the writing of the book.

Despite the extensive research on trafficking from Nigeria to Europe, much of the existing knowledge remains victim-centred and rooted in the field of social assistance. This focus has been crucial in shaping our understanding of the anti-trafficking landscape—particularly in highlighting which aspects of victims’ experiences are prioritised by institutions when assessing claims for humanitarian protection. However, it has also resulted in a narrow perspective, largely limited to the narratives of individuals who have been officially recognised as victims. Rizzotti’s book reconfigures established understandings of trafficking by incorporating the voices of convicted women, alongside those of identified victims and key stakeholders. Her fieldwork illuminates the ways in which Nigerian women resist and navigate the constraints placed on their social and geographical mobility—constraints often reinforced by institutional labels such as “trafficker” and “victim”—in order to pursue individual and collective migration goals. Rizzotti demonstrates that both convicted women and identified victims frequently share similar experiences and aspirations, particularly in their efforts to overcome restrictive migration regimes and gendered expectations imposed on them as racialised migrants from the Global South.

This book explores ‘exiting’ programs for sex workers, which are behavioural change interventions that support people to stop selling sex. This book examines questions about how we should conceptualise and respond to ‘exiting’ and, by centring sex workers’ voices, it provides evidence of the impact of these programs. It examines sex work ‘exiting’, not as something sex workers need to stop doing, but as part of sex work careers. Drawing on interviews and a global program review to establish best practice, this book challenges the idea of sex work as something a person is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of. It also explores sex workers’ resistance to this area of programming to highlight the power and politics of ‘exiting’. Using a labour framing and seeing sex work as career, this book repositions ‘exiting’ as career development and sheds new light on everyday working circumstances, popular discourses, policies and programs and grassroots struggles for change. As a co-collaboration incorporating knowledge from researchers and lived experience experts, this book is a unique addition that challenges the dominant abolitionist, anti-sex work framings and is of interest to academics, policy makers, sex worker support organisations and non-government organisations globally.

This book offers an original, critical analysis of the governance of sexual labour in Greece, tracing how state regulationism and feminist interventions have systematically separated sex work from other forms of women’s labour, constructing it as an exceptional field requiring heightened surveillance, discipline, and control. By analysing how feminist currents in Greece have at times aligned with state agendas—embracing punitive approaches under the banner of gender justice—it challenges dominant narratives that obscure class dynamics, migration realities, and the broader political economy of reproductive and intimate labour. At the same time, the book foregrounds sex workers’ strategies of resistance, community-building, and collective action.

This book explores the everyday lives of religious and spiritual sex workers in the United Kingdom and the United States. Challenging dominant assumptions that religiosity and sex work are inherently incompatible, it centres the voices of those whose experiences are routinely marginalised within dominant religious and secular discourse. Drawing on qualitative research, including participant-driven photographs, diaries, and in-depth interviews, the book examines how sex workers navigate belief, identity, stigma, intimacy, and belonging in their everyday lives. It reveals the complex ways religious and spiritual sex workers negotiate their occupational, religious, spiritual, familial, and personal identities, offering a nuanced account of lived religion and sex work. By focusing on micro-level experiences, the book moves beyond moral debates to illustrate how both religiosity and sex work are practised in ordinary moments and intimate spaces. In doing so, it challenges reductive portrayals of sex workers as either victims or sinners. Bridging sex work scholarship and the sociology of religion, this book will be of interest to academics, sex work support organisations, and policy makers seeking a more inclusive understanding of sex work and religiosity.