Turning sex workers into self-caring persons: relying on technologies of the self in social work practice

Abstract

Sex worker exit programmes are designed to help people stop selling sex and find alternative ways of getting by. Currently, there is limited knowledge about how these programmes operate to assist sex workers in adopting societal norms and expectations of a healthy and productive lifestyle. This article explores this question by analysing interviews with key stakeholders in Denmark’s official sex worker exit programmes that ran between 2020 and 2023. The results indicate that outreach work, counselling and therapy were promoted with the aim of turning sex workers into ‘reflective’, ‘knowing’ and ‘self-caring’ persons. By drawing on Foucauldian theory, the article unfolds this transformation as a process by which individuals aligned with and internalised particular subjectivities (subjectification). This practice relied on the sex workers’ competence to devise personal strategies for self-care, that is, technologies of the self, based on critical questions about the possibility of taking care of oneself while selling sex.