Work, Sex, and Sex-Work: Competing Feminist Discourses on the International Sex Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the competing discourses of radical feminism and sex radicalism on the international sex trade. These voices have been dominant in feminist debates on this issue and both have proved significant forces when it comes to legal reform. Radical feminists characterize prostitution as an abuse of human rights, regardless of whether it is forced or voluntary, and have fought for its abolition. They have had a substantial impact on the development and adoption of anti-trafficking legislation and instruments in various countries and at the international level. Sex radicals have offered compelling opposition, shifting the focus from the abolition of sex work to the human rights of sex workers. Their legal interventions have been geared toward self-determination for sex workers including decent working conditions and freedom of movement. This article employs the term "sex-work" as an analytical device by which to get to the bottom of these very different perspectives. An analysis of the respective emphases of radical feminists and sex radicals-on sex or work or sex-work-yields insight into the role assigned to the sex worker in each of these feminist theoretical discourses. This, in turn, has important implications for feminist activism in the international arena.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".