NCJ Number
230308
Journal
Journal of Law and Society Volume: 37 Issue: 1 Dated: March 2010 Pages: 1-11
Date Published
March 2010
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This collection of papers challenge the traditional responses to sexual commerce and consumption and offers a fresh approach to sex industry regulation in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Australia, and India.
Abstract
Each paper in this volume addresses contemporary empirical examples of the regulation of the sex industry in a specific country and reveals theoretical connections between the implications of regulation and sexuality, gender, and control. Consideration of the wide diversity of sex markets challenges traditional academic concentration on narrow forms of prostitution and allows for a more complex portrait of sex industry regulation to emerge. This volume seeks to respond to a particular moment in the study of commercial sex and its governance. The volume covers a diversity of sex markets, such as male sex work, men who buy sex, pornography, bar dancing, legalized brothels, and sex shops. These themes are discussed in the context of post-industrial transformations of culture and sexuality. In summation, this collection seeks to explore an increasingly complex regulatory scene; one which, it is suggested, takes the form of interrelated dynamics that broaden the levels of social control as well as intensifying the ways in which individuals are punished, rehabilitated, and rescued. Once there is an understanding of the links between regulation and governance than one can move towards a more informed, inclusive, and transformative politics of prostitution reform.