Abstract
Almost twenty years after the decriminalisation of sex work in Aotearoa New Zealand, the central research question of this thesis is: what are the workplace experiences of indoor sex workers in a decriminalised sex industry? This thesis adds to literature exploring sex work from a labour rights framework within a legislative model (decriminalisation) globally recognised as best practice (Healy, Pickering, & Hati, 2020; M. Smith & Mac, 2018, p. 85). During the COVID-19 lockdown, I interviewed 28 brothel, agency, and independent sex workers from across Aotearoa New Zealand using feminist qualitative methodologies and normative workplace assessments to explore what experiences exist in the workplaces of the decriminalised sex industry. I use worker subjectivities to structure my analysis of workplace experiences in the sex industry in Aotearoa New Zealand. These worker subjectivities are both parallel and distinct from those subjectivities in other waged labour options. The subjectivities produced in the sex industry that parallel straight (non-sex industry) industries are the affective worker, the commodified worker, and the responsible worker. These subjectivities are produced in modern (service) workplaces and are governed by emotional, affective, and aesthetic labour, as well as neoliberal norms. The three subjectivities that contrast those produced in straight workplaces are the compensated worker, the flexible worker, and the stigmatised worker. The subjectivities of compensated and flexible worker are produced by experiences of high financial return and the ability to accommodate life alongside work, while the stigmatised worker speaks to the stigma experienced by those working in the sex industry in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I analyse these workplace experiences using participant descriptions of norms that shape their experiences and the ways in which they interact with those norms. The navigation of both resisting and being constrained by norms “determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it” in the (re)creation of the social world (Foucault & Rabinow, 1994, p. 88). Within this thesis, I describe the wider labour market as the ‘contemporary work system’ (CWS), and define it according to its neoliberal, precarious, and gendered norms and values. I argue that the wider contemporary work system can learn much from the compensated and flexible worker subjectivities of the sex industry, and I thus draw from Weeks’ (2011) ‘reasonable utopia’ to frame those subjectivities as radical provocation to improve experiences in wider waged labour options.