Sex work careers: career trajectories in the Australian indoor sex industry

Two questions form the basis of this qualitative study: What meanings do women ascribe to their sex work careers? How are their career goals and aspirations shaped by the regulatory schemas under which they labour? Research continues to explore the complexity of career identity and career trajectories in the contemporary labour market. However, the ongoing refusal to acknowledge sexual services labour as work has limited the extent to which sex work has been explored in terms of broader careers. In order to examine this topic, this study investigates participants’ careers in the indoor Australian sex industry. Fourteen current and former sex workers participated in in-depth life-narrative interviews about their careers; and four support and advocacy workers participated in semi-structured interviews about sex-work career trajectories and work conditions, in three Australian jurisdictions: the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, and Victoria. Analysis of the data indicates that participants understood their labour as constituting work, and frequently understood their sex work as part of a career. Using Inkson’s (2007) career metaphors to structure the analysis, I examine participants’ meaning-making of their careers as: a story; a legacy of gendered and socio-economic constraints; as intertwined with the life cycle; a carefully crafted and planned construction; a result of matching the right career to the right person (or not); and as a networked practice involving relationships with others. Participants’ narratives demonstrated both the complex construction of career meaning within the life narrative, as well as the agentic and creative configuration of life and career undertaken by participants. Participants’ narratives also revealed the impacts of regulatory schemas on career objectives and work conditions, with these structural forces shaping and limiting career paths. In this thesis I examine the various ways within both legal and illegal sex work, that a specific kind of worker is normalized and controlled (with others rendered ‘deviant’ and denied rights because of this delineation). Moreover, I examine how various forms of regulation and surveillance shape work practices in the area, but also how they potentially shape, produce and limit careers in the sex industry. This thesis highlights the agency demonstrated by participants through their negotiation or resistance of dominant discourses, social norms and regulatory frameworks in attempting to work successfully in the sex industry.