To browse Academia. The industrialization of prostitution and the sex trade has created a multibillion-dollar global market, involving millions of women, that makes a substantial contribution to national and global economies. The expansion of the global sex trade over recent decades is the subject of considerable interest and controversy in political, philosophical, sociological, legal, religious, media and medical debates. Contemporary discourse often centres on the morality or not of commercial sex and is framed in terms of a series of dichotomies and oppositions such as domination versus liberation, force versus consent, victimhood versus agency, and violence versus pleasure.
Increasingly, however, feminist scholars are carving out space to think of commercial sex not just as a 'moral issue' but also as a 'political economy' issue: that is, to interrogate the political, economic and cultural context s of sexual markets by placing this within the wider analysis of global power relations. Coming from a diversity of theoretical and political backgrounds, these scholars explore the complex ways in which the growth and diversification of sex markets world-wide is both produced by and productive of the structural hierarchies of global capitalism.
Yet, there remains significant contestation over how best to understand the political economy of commercial sex: while some authors contend that the global sexual economy serves primarily to reinforce and reproduce global inequalities, others argue that it might also represent a site of agency and even resistance. Economic globalization, shifting trends in militarization, and anxieties aroused by increases in labor migration across international borders, are now affecting the goals and concerns of labor organizing.
Organizing in the "informal" economic sector - including piecework manufacturing, small-scale factories, and gray markets, and the sex industry - is growing more important. An expanding informal sector entails the increased feminization of migration poverty, and of unorganized labor. Prostitution has been an ever-present feature of informal economic sectors and of unorganized labor.
Now there growing movement underway to champion the rights of people working in sex industry. Prostitution will figure more prominently on labor's map. This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective.
