Reorienting Feminist Strategies Relating to Adult Transactional Sex

suzanne Bouclin, University of Ottawa

Abstract

Feminist-informed policies around transactional sex continue to highlight and reinforce the ontological, epistemological and aesthetic disagreements between abolitionists and sex workers’ rights advocates. In this paper, I examine the Canadian context to provide some geographic and social specificity to such debates occurring through the global West. I review the anchoring concepts of feminist perspectives on the sale of sexual services by adults. I then suggest an intersectional understanding of sex work and deploy it to provide guidelines for addressing feminist concerns around commercial sex that avoid checkmated arguments and binary distinctions that do little to reduce the conditions of oppression that women selling sex experience. I argue that feminist still need to reorient strategies and policy proposals in a number of ways. First, we should acknowledge that many sex-workers already make up a jurisgenerative community. Second, we must recognize that the sex worker community cannot be limited to people who are the provision side of the transaction. Third, feminist should favour an ethos of respectful dissensus rather than the more orthodox feminist model of consensus.