Inventing sex work

Abstract

Carol Leigh tells her feminist politicization process though an autobiographical story and includes some debates about femininity, sexuality and pornography that existed in feminist movement in the 1970s. Author tells her experience in the incorporation into an American hegemonic feminism. In this case, it talks about prostitution without the experience of the sex workers themselves and it doesn’t recognize them as political subjects with agency. Leigh, based on her introduction into prostitution, describes the complexities of this activity, the struggle of sex workers to improve their labor conditions and processes of political organization by the creation of alliances with other groups. In the context of feminist disputes, author proposes to coin the term “sex work”. On the one hand, she wants to separate it from the negative connotations associated with prostitution, and on the other, to reclaim the emergence of this political movement.