“New York is Dying”: Policing Outdoor Sex Workers in the Era of AIDS and Urban Renewal, 1981-88
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the history of scapegoating sex workers in times of heightened moral anxiety is well-studied, work remains to be done on how the co-occurring crises of AIDS and “urban decline” in New York City inspired a renewed crackdown on street-based sex work. Though after 1978 New York State’s prostitution statute prohibited purchasing and selling sex, arrests continued to disproportionately affect women performing sex work, especially those based on the street. Three forces interacted to put “streetwalkers” at the centre of fears about the city’s moral and physical health. First, New Yorkers seized on an image of their city since the mid-1970s as a dangerous and vice-ridden metropolis to denigrate sex workers. Metaphors of disease—including the language used to describe AIDS—were readily deployed against sex work to “explain” New York’s state of sickness. Second, medical studies, which were decontextualized and disseminated in newspapers, posited sex workers as an epidemiological missing link between the gay and straight populations. Third, as part of a larger campaign to “clean up” blighted areas marked for “urban renewal,” the NYPD became increasingly aggressive towards outdoor sex workers. Sex workers met an array of popular assumptions about them by organizing conference meetings, educating each other on HIV/AIDS, and attempting to forge a counter-narrative to scapegoating. Their pursuit of self-representation was not always successful, but they used the resources available to them to mount moments of resistance and share strategies for survival within their ranks.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".