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Boundaries of Legitimacy: Sex, Violence, Citizenship, and Community in a Local Sexual Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Lisa E. Sanchez
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Abstract

Studies of prostitution have overlooked the role of law in constituting the identities and sexual practices of women in the sex trade and defining the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence in the sexual economy. Drawing on field work with sex trade participants in a northwestern United States city, this paper explores how the cultural logic of modern liberal law shapes women's identities and interpretations of their actions. In positioning women in the sex trade as “sexual outlaws” to be managed and subjected to the full scope of legal authority, the law simultaneously limits women's citizenship and withdraws its protection. Moreover, in restricting women's capacity to invoke fundamental legal rights, the law effectively sanctions “private” or extralegal forms of discipline and creates a space for violence. Given the paradoxical position these women hold as sexual outlaws on the one hand and frequent victims of physical and sexual assault on the other, I explore how they negotiate consent and resist violence.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , Summer 1997 , pp. 543 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1997 

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