Live Sex Acts

Drawing on 50 interviews in both the criminalized sex industry of the United States and in the free and open trade in the Netherlands, this volume aims to capture the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labour and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work.

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Drawing on more than fifty interviews in both the US and the Netherlands, Wendy Chapkis captures the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labor and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work. Her expansive analytic perspective encompasses both a serious examination of international prostitution policy as well as hands-on accounts of contemporary commercial sexual practices. Scholarly, but never simply academic, this book is explicitly grounded in a concern for how competing political discourses work concretely in the world--to frame policy and define perceptions of AIDS, to mobilize women into opposing camps, to silence some agendas and to promote others.