Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor

by Wendy Chapkis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317795766
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/02/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Wendy Chapkis is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Southern Maine, Portland.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Section I: Sex Wars; Chapter 1 The Meaning of Sex; Chapter 2 Sexual Slavery; Section II: Working It; Chapter 3 The Emotional Labor of Sex; Chapter 4 Locating Difference; Section III: Strategic Responses; Chapter 5 Prohibition and Informal Tolerance; Chapter 6 Legalization, Regulation, and Licensing; Chapter 7 Sex Worker Self-Advocacy; Chapter 8 Compromising Positions;

Editorial Reviews

Commercial sex has long been a troublesome issue for feminists. Chapkis, a sociologist and author of Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance, is a self-professed champion of the rights of prostitutes and pornographers. This sets her at odds with those who are opposed to women's participation in "erotic labor" on the grounds that it exploits them. Here, she conducts 50-plus unstructured interviews with women in the trade between 1986 and 1995 in the Netherlands and in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, Calif.-all places where Chapkis lived. The author notes that she reprints fewer than half the interviews, which may reveal a great deal more about Chapkis than about her subjects. The book is shaped into seven main chapters, each with an academic essay about some aspect of the sex trade followed by two or more edited, but graphic, interviews with women in the sex business. The interviewees included "call girls, escort workers, pornography actresses and models, brothel workers, exotic dancers, peep show workers, phone sex workers, street workers, and window prostitutes." Chapkis also personally experimented with buying and selling sex to experience the transactions. Eight black-and-white photos of professional women add to the gritty and realistic, rather than erotic, tone of the book. It is part sociology and part journalism, with a polemic on the rights of women in the commercial-sex business running throughout. The mix doesn't work well, and will likely disappoint the possible audiences interested in sociology, journalism or polemic. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"In a strikingly incisive review of feminist literature on prostitution, Chapkis pulls off the neat feat of focusing in on and then blurring the traditional lines that have distinguished love and violence, romance and sex, and madonnas and whores." — Jodi O'Brien, Signs
"Chapkis is an exceedingly purposeful and interesting writer. Her discourse, which is often amusing and never boring, competently negotiates between the specificity of sex work and the abstraction of theory." — Lesbian Review of Books
"Chapkis' research, conducted primarily in California and Amsterdam, is presented here as a series of essays, personal stories, and interviews...She aims to change the tone of the feminist sex debates, bridging the daunting gaps between such such self-identified feminists as Kathleen Barry, Andrea Dworkin, Pat Califia and Camille Paglia." — Ms. Magazine
"Wendy Chapkis...has a knack for writing intriguing, jargon-free, reader-friendly books that explore subjects on the margins of mainstream American life...As both a study of a marginalized group [sex workers] and an essay on the great divide within the feminist movement, Live Sex Acts is a page-turner, sparkling with insight and with the surprising voices of prostitutes themselves." — Dissident
"Live Sex Acts combines a tought realism, a capacity for clear thinking, and an irrepressible sense of humor. This is social science as it ought to be written." — R.W. Connell, author of Masculinities, Rethinking Sex
"Superb interviewing." — Susie Bright, author of Sexwise
"Chapkis did her homework, letting sex workers expose prostitution prohibition for what it is: gender control." — Margo St. James, Coyote
"Anyone who cares about the welfare of prostitutes, the status of women, or the so-called feminist sex debates should read this book." — Valerie James, author of Making It Work: The Prostitutes' Rights Movement in Perspective

From the Publisher