History from Below in Camden Walks
From Navvyman by Dick Sullivan via www.victorianweb.org What do you think about when you hear the name Primrose Hill? Good pubs, celebrity-residents, the view over London? For me…
Tag: urban space
Sex workers working with police: Sue Davis, Vancouver BC
We hear most about the big moments in sex workers’ rights movements – court decisions, parliamentary reports, conferences, public protests. But many groups engage in negotiations behind th…
Sound Politics in COVID-19 Brooklyn
Last spring, New Yorkers participated in the 7:00 p.m. clap to show solidarity with “essential workers” and assuage feelings of isolation. They used noisy cacerolazos to mobilize collectiv…
Are slum tours doing more harm than good?
by Rachel Jackson Last year, I spent several months working in an NGO in Peru. Before travelling home, I decided to take a trip to Brazil and spend…
Book Review: Athens and the War on Public Space: Tracing a City in Crisis by Klara Jaya Brekke, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis
In Athens and the War on Public Space: Tracing a City in Crisis, Klara Jaya Brekke, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis merge textual and visual material to focus on Athen’s…
Creators of the Contemporary in Africa
In Ghana, the creative culture and the contemporary art sphere is in a period of exponential growth and reconfiguration. Across Accra and Kumasi, the contemporary creative scene has…
Highways as sexwork-places, with chairs
When the topic is selling sex outdoors, mainstream media stick to the same photos over and over. Generally now posed, the shots show young female bodies chopped off…
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
…May ’68, Nuit Debout and Romanticizing Struggles by Jade Ascencio In 2016, the Nuit Debout movement in Paris installed its headquarters only two stops away from my place.…
Rethinking chronic illness and ethnography
by Luke Walker Since my diagnosis with Crohn’s disease in 2015, I have started to re-think the relationship between chronic illness, disability, and protest in a series of…
International Day To End Violence against Sex Workers
On the International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers, 17 December, I’ll be in Skopje, Macedonia, invited to speak and march by the Coalition ‘Sexual and Health…
My body, my walk
by Georgette Veerhuis Two weeks ago I was catcalled while I was making my way through Hull, a port town located in east Yorkshire. This prompted a reflexive…
Sex work in fiction: Gorky Park, Moscow prostitution doesn’t exist
Militia detectives are at Kazansky Station in Komsomol Square, in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park. Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 photo shows the station at the left and surrounding traffic. …
Migrants sell sex in flats, or are they brothels?
Why does it matter where you sell sex? Although most photos attached to media stories show truncated women’s bodies standing in dark streets, the news often concerns indoors:…
Incitement to paedophilia: It’s the zeitgeist
The headline reads Spanish brothel’s “back to school” party sparks outrage in Andalusia. El Bosque is a legal club de alterne where sex workers drink, dance and chat with customers…
When buildings burn, from London to Dhaka
by Rebecca Prentice There is for me a sad familiarity in the story of the Grenfell Tower fire. I have spent recent years researching garment factory fires and…
Wearing slammerkins and dreaming: Sex work in fiction
In Slammerkin, Mary is a street prostitute in mid-18th-century London. Thrown out of her dismal basement home by a mother absolute in condemnation of Mary’s pregnancy at 14,…
Wearing slammerkins and dreaming: Sex work in fiction
In Slammerkin, Mary is a street prostitute in mid-18th-century London. Thrown out of her dismal basement home by a mother absolute in condemnation of Mary’s pregnancy at 14,…
Festival Culture: the Romanticisation of Informal Settlements?
by Tim Perkin The show ‘Borderline’, a PSYCHEdelight production, recently took part to an arts festival in the UK. The show portrayed a satirical account of the Calais…
The girlfriend experience in Lawrence Block: Sex work in fiction
Lawrence Block is a successful mainstream writer whose plotlines often include sex workers, in a normalising way (call girls, mostly). Matthew Scudder, the detective protagonist in one of Block’…
Hustling and cruising with John Rechy: Sex work in fiction
You know how it is when you are staying at someone’s house and you finish your own book and have to look around the alien shelves for something…
James Lee Burke with French Quarter scam: Sex work in fiction
In today’s shrill anti-trafficking culture any differences in forms of facilitating prostitution/ sex work are practically erased. I’m not talking about whether anything is fair or gender-…
Women selling sex in the postwar London of Doris Lessing
The Four-Gated City was published in 1969 by Doris Lessing. The passage quoted below describes a single young woman walking west on the Bayswater Road in 1950. The…
The Three-Headed Dog: Sexwork and Migration Mystery
Despite how it might look to those who’ve known me only since Sex at the Margins, I’m not making a sudden switch to fiction. It’s one of the…