1st Edition

Sex Work and Language

Edited By Benedict J.L. Rowlett, Rodrigo Borba Copyright 2025
372 Pages 34 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

372 Pages 34 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

372 Pages 34 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This collection brings together established and exciting new voices to shed light on the language of and about sex work, offering an empirically nuanced understanding of commercial sex through language. While there is burgeoning literature on sex work in the social sciences, there has been little work to date centering it from a linguistic perspective. Chapters make the case for language as... Read more

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

1          Speaking of sex work: Setting a research agenda

            BENEDICT J. L. ROWLETT AND RODRIGO BORBA

2            ‘Why do you think a woman can’t enjoy sex as much as a man can?’: Discourses of women’s sexual desire, pleasure and agency in an online sex work forum

            HOLLIE MCILHONE, ROBERT LAWSON, MATT GEE AND PELHAM CARTER

3            The pleasure of pleasing: a corpus-assisted small stories approach to male clients’ affective identity constructions of heterosexual desire in PunterNet reviews

            SAGREDOS CHRISTOS

4          ‘I’m not a faggot, I’m a man’: Male sex workers doing masculinity talking sex

            CIRUS RINALDI, MARCO BACIO AND RICCARDO CALDARERA

5            Polyvalent attribution and the discursive construction of Blackwomen’s sexual labor in The Boondocks

            DEANDRE MILES-HERCULES AND MARIAH WEBBER

6          ‘Good evening you sex-hungry crowd!’: Discursive-corporeal performances and strategies of a Black male sex worker on X/Twitter

            GLENDA CRISTINA VALIM DE MELO

7            The narratives she lives by: Identity, intersection and agency in the many roles of a Filipina sex worker in Hong Kong

            BENEDICT J. L. ROWLETT AND JASON POLLEY

8            Sissy hypno in a trans-affirming register: Shifting semiotics of pornography online

            MAUREEN KOSSE AND KIRA HALL

9            Computable desires: Platformed sex work and the datafication of intimacy

            EDUARDO MARTINS

10          Resisting discrimination against sex work/ers: A critical discourse analysis of comments on YouTube

            EVELIN NIKOLOVA

11          Sex workers’ place of enunciation: A materialist discourse analytical approach

            MARIA FERNANDA MOREIRA, KARINE DE MEDEIROS RIBEIRO AND LAURO BALDINI

12          Hyperbole for advocacy: Stereotypical and subversive sex work in Naty Menstrual’s writing

              JOSE ANTONIO JÓDAR-SÁNCHEZ

13          The dynamics of agency in sex work: Discursive constructions of violence in transnational contexts

            JILL MCCRACKEN AND RAN HU

14          ‘Foreign, illegal prostitutes’ and ‘New Zealand working girls’: Sex workers as villains and victims in media discourse

            MATILDA NEYLAND

15        ‘I am not a victim of anything’: Minors identified as victims of human trafficking in Italy

            TRINE MYGIND KORSBY

Index

 

Biography

Benedict J.L. Rowlett is Associate Professor in the Academy of Language and Culture at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Rodrigo Borba is Associate Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme in Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.