Sex Work Stigma: Opportunist Migrants in London

Abstract

The social institution of prostitution or sex work has a long and varied history in the West, during almost all of which women plying their trade within it have been stigmatized. After a brief excursus on contemporary sex work and the concept of stigma itself, this article applies the author's jigsaw model to throw light on the causal role of social structures in shaping sex work stigma, in relation to women migrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics working as escorts in central London, typically on a short-term opportunistic basis. Interviews with a small snowball sample of a dozen women inform and illustrate the analysis. The differential causal effects of relations of class, command, gender and ethnicity, as well as those of stigma, are considered. It is argued that stigma relations in a given context or figuration cannot be grasped in isolation, but are always part of a nexus of social structures of varying causal importance.