Browsing by Subject "sex workers"
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Item GIFT Project-Phase I(2009) Gun, YaelItem Lusty Ladies: Sex Work and Sex-Positive Politics, 1970-2013(2019-08) Swift, JayneLusty Ladies: Sex Work and Sex-Positive Politics, 1970-2013, offers the first historical and critical exploration of the politics of sex-positivity, through a larger cultural history of sex worker social movements in the late-20th-century United States. Using the Lusty Lady theater (a historically-significant and recently closed legal commercial sex franchise), I argue that people in the sex trade have challenged their social marginalization and criminalization and made their employment legible as work through authoring discourses of “sex-positive” feminism. Sex-positivity was instrumental in forming a new political collectivity: sex workers. Through oral history interviews with one-time employees of the franchise, archival research, and historical analysis of the cultural production of sex workers, my research demonstrates the materialist roots and world-making capacities of sex-positivity.Item Safety on the Streets(2009) Gun, YaelItem Social Interactions Among Slaves And Sex Workers In Plautus(2024) Manley, FadeThe comedies of Plautus repeatedly focus on the love lives of wealthy citizen men, who pursue citizen girls, sex workers, or their own wives despite a variety of obstacles. Many character types of lower status--especially slaves (both male and female) and sex workers (both enslaved and free)--appear repeatedly in these comedies, but are typically examined in scholarship through their relationships to the free men. This project analyses how these lower-status characters interact with each other in these comedies. It examines different categories of social interactions--friendly, amatory, hostile, hierarchical--as they appear across multiple comedies, to reveal how Plautus portrayed these low-status characters outside of their relationships with free citizens. The slaves and sex workers of the plays act out their awareness of hierarchies even as they express varied personalities within repetitive interaction styles. Ultimately, the patterns seen in these social interactions convey cultural assumptions about what enslaved people and those performing sexual labor were "really" like: these characters hold the same prejudices, understand the same cultural values, and adhere to the same systems of social hierarchy as any citizen in the audience, no matter how much any of those prejudices, values, or hierarchies might harm the low-status characters and thus real people.