Troubling decriminalization : a genealogy of prostitution decriminalization in New South Wales

Scott, John and Scoular, Jane (2024) Troubling decriminalization : a genealogy of prostitution decriminalization in New South Wales. Radical History Review, 2024 (149). pp. 200-217. (https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-11027561)

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Abstract

In the context of a fiercely polarized battle on the correct legal response to prostitution, sex workers and their advocates often advance decriminalization as a policy that can protect rights and provide improved health and safety for those involved in the sex industry. And yet this policy, after an initial implementation in New South Wales in 1995, has failed to gain much legislative support in jurisdictions outside Australia and New Zealand. This article moves beyond normative arguments regarding the benefits and limits of decriminalization. Drawing on governmentality approaches, it asks: What discursive conditions made decriminalization possible? In doing so it examines the construction of sex work as a health problem and the normalization of “sex work,” arguing that both can be grounded in a neoliberal problematic of governance.

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