School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Research Students

Giulia Garofalo

Thesis title: Political Economy of Sex Work in Europe

Supervisors: Merl Storr (UEL), Robert Cannon (UEL)

About my research:

Proposing an analysis of sex work that would do justice to sex workers’ organisations claims for the recognition of value and social power (Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto (2005)), my research seeks to investigate both the “economic” and the “sexual” elements in prostitution, and the way one crucially cannot disentangle them.
The project is twofold.
A first engagement is with materialist feminist, queer, and sex workers’ developments (Pheterson (1996), Tabet (2004)) to explore the stigmatisation of sex work in relation to its potentiality for breaking in the way certain groups, traditionally but not only women, are supposed to give services to the others. In this perspective the specificity of sex work may be adequately captured if we look at sexuality in general as a production process. A central idea of the research is that to people of every gender in contemporary Europe working with sex potentially offers a radical (self-) employment of what may be thought of as their relational resources in connection to their gender, class, nationality, "race", sexual orientation.
A second engagement that shapes my project is the need to understand the conditions for this potentiality of sex work to develop. A crucial part of the research consists of building a web-based inquiry addressing people who have experiences of working in prostitution in Europe to collect their opinions on how the industry works for them, how it could work, and how it should work.

Research activities:

Presented papers

• “What is the problem with a gender analysis of prostitution?” presented at the Warwick Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, Graduate Student Seminar Series, Warwick, 17th of November 2004
• “What is the problem with prostitution? The challenge of prostitution to society and social analysis” presented at the PhD seminar, SSMACS, UEL, 9th of May 2005
• “Queer critiques and the politics of paid sex” presented at the Sexuality Seminar, SSMACS, UEL, 9th of June 2005
• “Which kind of critiques does the trafficking debate prevent us from? The needs and challenges of a radical analysis of prostitution and sexualised labour” presented at the NEWR (Network of European Women’s Rights) Final Conference, Birmingham, 30th of June 2005
• “The European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour Rights and Migration” co-presented with Jesper Bryngemark at Sex Work Matters, New York, 30th of March 2006
• “Radical Political Economy of Sex Work” presented at Sex Work Matters, New York, 30th of March 2006
• “What is wrong with the current anti-trafficking politics?” Seminar at the European Social Forum, Athens, co-organised by Frassanito Network, NextGenderation, and the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, 4th of May 2006

Publications

• Entry on "Feminist policies", co-authored with Ingrid Robeyns, in Phil O'Hara (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Public Policy, Routledge, forthcoming 2006
• “Towards a political economy of "trafficking" in Christien van den Anker and Jeroen Doomernik (eds.) Trafficking and Women’s rights, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2006
• Reviews of Sex Tourism, by C.Ryan, M.Hall (2001) London, Routledge and of Taking It Off, Putting It On. Women in the Strip Trade, by Chris Bruckert, Women's Press, Toronto, 2002 for Feminist Review, Palgrave, 81, 2005, pp.129-132.

Research projects

• NEWR, Network of European Women’s Rights (2002-2005)
  Collaboration with Prof. Francesca Bettio, Department of Political Economy, University of Siena, Italy
• Analysis of migration flows at risk: prostitution and trafficking, Inter-university Research Project: Siena, Torino, Firenze, Salerno (2005-2006)
• Collaboration with Prof. Francesca Bettio, Department of Political Economy, University of Siena, Italy

Contact: gagiulia@yahoo.it

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