CUENTA DE CIERRE

Sex workers’ location in urban space has long received scholarly and political attention (Hubbard, 2012a: 35 ; Symanski, 1981; Rubin, 1975). A growing body of empirical studies, largely in the Global North, examines how sex work policies, policing, planning and regulation, neoliberal urban policies and processes, and wider power relations, shape the geographies of sex work (for reviews, see e.g. Hubbard, 2012a; Hubbard, 2012b). Such work demonstrates how sex work laws and policies have typically worked to confine, contain and surveille sex workers in certain spaces (e.g. red-light districts, state-regulated brothels) and displace or exclude them from others (e.g. prostitution-free zones) (Hubbard, 2014; Laing and Cook, 2014; Edelman, 2011). A central tenet of these governing strategies is the maintenance of boundaries between moral and immoral space (Hubbard, 1999b), displacing and containing sex workers “away” from the ‘public’ (Laing and Cook, 2014: 7; Hubbard and Whowell, 2008)―particularly children, families and those religiously or culturally opposed to sex work (Hubbard, 2014). These processes work not only by removing sex workers themselves, but also symbols of their presence, such as advertising (Hubbard, 2001). Municipal planning and licensing laws (Hubbard, 2014) and, in some contexts active demolition of red-light districts (Bandewar et al., 2016), work to displace sex workers and venues, as corporate development interests align with efforts to ‘tackle’ prostitution, and make way for families and consumers

(Ross, 2010; Prior et al., 2011). Sanchez (2004), meanwhile, argues that increasingly exclusionary “spatial governmentality” in western cities seeks not to displace sex workers but to “banish” them from urban space and society.

Hubbard (1998; 1999b; 2000; 2008) draws on Sibley’s (1995 ) and Cresswell’s (1996 )

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as dangerous, unhygienic, and other―and boundary-making. Thus, red-light districts are designed to prevent ‘pollution’ and ‘disruption’ contaminating other spaces, locating sex workers in a “liminal landscape of danger and display” to contain the ‘problems’ and ‘disorder’ of the city (Hubbard, 2000: 204; Hubbard, 1998). This discursive and material marginalisation produces a “moral geography” whereby certain practices are only morally permissible in certain places (Hubbard and Sanders, 2003: 79; Hubbard, 2012a), and authorities policing sex work become central to enforcing the moral spatial order (Hubbard, 2004a; Sanders, 2004b). Concurrent public health measures and surveillance (e.g. CCTV cameras) institute bio-political and disciplinary forms of governance (Hubbard, 2014).

A number of studies illustrate intersections with broader relations of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Hubbard (2004b: 666) demonstrates how efforts to remove female sex workers from prime spaces in western cities “re-inscribe” both economic and “patriarchal relations in the urban landscape”―effects obscured by the framing of such policies as fostering ‘community safety’ and gender equality, and by the singular focus of much scholarship on the role of capitalist development (Hubbard, 2014). In Vancouver, residents (Krüsi et al., 2016), including middle-class (white) gay men (Ross, 2010; Ross and Sullivan, 2012), aligned with private security guards, business owners and politicians to protest the presence of street- based sex workers, many of whom were trans women of colour, producing “whitened [spaces] … made safe for bourgeois (queer) capitalism” (Ross, 2010: 197)―in a context where sex workers are institutionally understood as “victims” and police guidelines instruct officers to respect their rights and safety (Krüsi et al., 2016). In Washington D.C., the policing of a ‘prostitution-free zone’, which allowed officers to temporarily displace those sex-working or suspected of doing so, involved regular profiling of trans women of colour, excluding them

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as “racial, sexed, and gendered others” (Edelman, 2011: 862). While police raids may respond to complaints of ‘nuisance’ behaviour, they may also reflect “muscular and punitive ‘zero tolerance’ policing” in alignment with “middle class sensibilities” (Hubbard, 2014: 4). The spatial governmentality (Sanchez, 2004) of sex work therefore cannot be decoupled from broader urban policies and practices and the gendered, racial, and class relations of the city (Hubbard, 2014).

Although these strategies have highly negative consequences for people who sell sex, a growing number of studies examine how sex workers rework these spaces and resist their exclusion (Hubbard, 2000; Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Hart, 1995; Hubbard, 1999b). Sex worker activists have organised to denounce these policies and related abuses―through street protests and parades (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Chateauvert, 2015), occupation of churches (NSWP, 2016), impromptu performances (Blanchette and Murray, 2016; Chateauvert, 2015), online campaigns, written responses, and policy briefs (Crago, 2009; Asijiki, 2017; ICRSE, 2014). They have at times engaged directly with police and local governments (Biradavolu et al., 2009; Lalani, 2014) and other civil society and social movements―reflected, for example, in trans groups organising against the prostitution-free zone in Washington DC (Edelman, 2011), and HIV activists and practitioners working with sex workers to challenge police raids and violence, in Peru and India (Lalani, 2014; Biradavolu et al., 2009). Yet others have experienced a lack of such support from such groups: in Vancouver, few (white) gay men and labour/community organisers joined sex workers’ fight against their displacement (Ross and Sullivan, 2012; Ross, 2010).

Less work has examined sex workers’ everyday tactics of spatial resistance (de Certeau, 2011). Examples include direct challenges to “law and order” but also, and most

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often, the ways in which sex workers “rework and divert … spaces to create an alternative meaning of space―a space that has its own morality, rhythms and rituals which are often invisible to outsiders” (Hubbard, 1999b: 183). Hubbard and Sanders (2003: 80) argue that red- light districts are produced through a “complex assemblance” of, and conflict between, the spatial ordering strategies of the “state, law and citizenry” (representations of space) and the tactics of people selling sex there (spaces of representation). Sex workers, then, are not “passive recipients” of spatial governance strategies but are active in reworking spaces to occupational ends (Hubbard and Sanders, 2003: 87).

As such, Hubbard and Sanders (2003: 97) argue that sex work also has the potential to “create new ‘spaces of representation’ that challenge the heterosexual ordering of society”. Yet they warn against overemphasising sex workers’ resistance, given the asymmetrical power relations governing these spaces. Research in Detroit, U.S., illustrates these complex relations of power, governance, and resistance. Draus et al. (2015: 453) juxtapose the “fluidity” of spaces of street sex work and drug use, and the mobility of sex workers between them, against the more “rigid … racial segregation patterns and gender hierarchies”. They do so to draw attention to sex workers’ agency, however constrained, as they move “within and around these spaces”, while also examining how their daily lives are “circumscribed by economics, illicit substance use, and the objective risks of the street and the police” (Draus et al., 2015: 453).