Crossing borders: the intersectional marginalisation of Bulgarian Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers in Berlin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bordering situates immigrant sex workers at the margins of an already marginalised industry and naturalises the legal conditions of their dispossession and precarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, we offer a situated intersectional analysis of the everyday bordering experiences of Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers from Bulgaria (hereafter TISWs). Focusing on three interactional contexts – minority belonging within EU and German politics, encounters with medicolegal institutions, and the new sex work regulation in Germany – our study demonstrates both that everyday bordering experiences derive not solely from national border enforcement and citizenship regulation but also from intersectional sociocultural barriers imposed by non-state actors, while the internal bordering practices of the German state exacerbate the exclusion and marginalisation of sex/gender transgressive people and sex work. We conclude that despite their physical existence as EU citizens in Berlin, TISWs’ everyday bordering experiences require a more nuanced understanding of intersectional systems of oppression which postpones TISWs’ arrival in Berlin indefinitely.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".