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Resumo

This article addresses the question of whether the Korean sex workers' rights movement has uncritically imported Western pro‐sex work theories. This article demonstrates how sex workers challenged stigma and discrimination, government controls, and anti‐trafficking campaigns by the Christian women's movement in the early 1900s. Applying a transnational feminist perspective, I analyzed newspaper and magazine articles from the period that write about sex workers, as well as literature written by sex workers themselves. Long before the emergence of academic sex work theory, sex workers in Korea fought and stood in solidarity in defense of their labor and survival rights. Navigating their complex sociopolitical positions in an era characterized by women's liberation and notions of human equality, the advent of capitalism, the influx of socialist ideology, and Japanese colonialism, sex workers have forged their own lives and enacted radical political praxis from the front lines. It is hoped that this century‐old history of sex workers' claims and rights movements serve as a basis for understanding that sex workers are the ones who know best what is needed to secure their rights, as they have the deepest understanding of the social and economic dimensions of their profession.

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