Junior Scholar Interdisciplinary Writing Competition (2009)

“Woman ” for Sale: Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Question of Sex Work This dissertation seeks to destabilize categories of interpretation endemic to contemporary debates on sex work in the Global North. While a queer reading of what feminists are saying about prostitution serves as one bookend to this project, an archival investigation of what prostitutes are saying about their own experience serves as the other. Bringing the category of class back into feminism — and into a queer project that remains curiously silent about both class generally and prostitution specifically — I ground an alternate, queer genealogy of sex work in the theoretical recuperation of prostitution as a specific relation under late global capitalism