ILPC 2027

This paper draws on ethnographic research focusing on the work experiences of men and women employed in sex shops in London’s Soho, an area that has been at the heart of the capital’s sex industry throughout its history. Attempting to ‘visualize’ sexualized labour in its broadest sense, the analysis re-visits earlier research on sexualized labour, body work and the ‘aesthetic economy’ (Böhme, 2003) in order to shift away from an understanding of sexualized forms of labour as those which explicitly involve a commodification of the ‘look’ of sales-service providers, teasing out the broader spatial and social materiality of sexualization within this particular sector and setting. In doing so, the paper draws on both interview and observational data, as well as visual material focusing on the body work, space and setting shaping sales-service work in Soho’s sex shops, in order to explore important but neglected aspects of what Butler (1993: 28) calls the ‘scenography of production’ in the performance of sexualized labour. The latter focuses theoretical attention specifically on the dynamic inter-relationship between gender performativity, materiality and signification, themes which shape the theoretical analysis of the empirical material presented here, and which draw together a concern with space, aesthetics and embodiment in the analysis of sexualized forms of labour.

References

 Böhme, G. (2003) ‘Contribution to the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy’. Thesis Eleven, 73: 71-82.

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge.