Global pressures, local measures: the re-regulation of sex work in the Antwerp Skipper’s Quarter

This paper analyzes the changes in the Antwerp Skipper’s Quarter, one of the oldest and largest red light districts on the European continent. While the geography of sex work has received considerable scholarly attention since the 1970s, such analyses have focused upon the interplay between market pressures and sexual values in the production of sexual spaces. This paper takes a different stance, as it analyses the Skipper’s Quarter’s restructuring in the light of the globalization of the sex industry. This analysis reveals how more attention should be paid to globalization’s local mediation (glocalization) in the analysis of the changing urban geographies of sex work. Such an approach not only supports the interpretation of local diversity in the urban geographies of sex work. It also conveys a more politicized understanding as it zooms in on the political struggles in which new urban geographies of sex work unfold.status: publishe