But the kids are okay: motherhood, consumption and sex work in neo‐liberal Latin America
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although sex work remains highly stigmatized around the world, its relatively high value (when compared to other kinds of work available for low-income women) allows sex workers to attain some level of economic, if not social, mobility. This article challenges the idea that sex work in 'third world' settings is always about mere subsistence. Instead, it suggests that sex workers in Costa Rica's tourism sector work to survive, but they also demonstrate significant personal ambition and aim not only to increase their own consumption levels, but crucially to get ahead. Women are clear about what sex work enables for their families and themselves: not the maintenance of the status quo, but rather a level of consumption otherwise unavailable to them as low-income and poor women. Sex work offers an opportunity to consume and to get ahead that these women have been unable to attain in other kinds of employment, primarily domestic and factory work. Furthermore, sex work allows women to think of themselves as particularly good mothers, able to provide for and spend important quality time with their kids. The article argues that survival, consumption, and motherhood are discursively deployed, in often contradictory and conflicting ways, in order to counteract the effects that stigma has on sex workers. It also suggests that sex workers may very well be the quintessential subjects of neo-liberalism in Latin America, in their embrace of entrepreneurial work and consumption.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it