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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Item type: Article ID code: 89829 Dates: DateEvent1 May 2024Published7 November 2022AcceptedSubjects: Law
History General and Old WorldDepartment: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Strathclyde Law School > Law Depositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 03 Jul 2024 13:39 Last modified: 03 Jul 2024 14:13 URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/89829