Queer theory, sex work and the European Union

On the constitutive exclusion of sex work from the European Union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual policies

Bibliographic Data

ID7989381
AuthorsLucrecia Rubio Grundell (0000-0003-3181-5213, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume8
Issue1
Pages129-150
Publication date2024-05-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of Politics and Gender (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2515-1088 • E-ISSN: 2515-1096
PublisherBristol University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/25151088y2024d000000032
OpenAlexW4396674932
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited36

In this article, I analyse the constitutive effects of the exclusion of sex work for the European Union’s (EU’s) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual (LGBTI) policies. I combine queer theory, the literature on EU LGBTI politics and approaches that address sex work from a queer perspective and develop a discursive analysis of the EU’s LGBTI policies between 1984 and 2020. I argue that the EU’s LGBTI policies exclude sex work in various ways and that such exclusion is constitutive of the EU’s LGBTI policies themselves, in particular, when sex work is framed in neo-abolitionist terms. Specifically, the EU’s LGBTI policies exclude sex work as a constitutive other against which the neoliberal and homonormative sexual subject of rights and new sexual respectability that structures such policies are constructed. The exclusion of sex work from the EU’s LGBTI policies is thus indispensable to disciplining political subjectivity and sexuality in line with heteronormativity and neoliberalism in such terms

Economics · European union · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Political science · Queer · Sex work · Sociology · Transgender · Transgender people · Work (physics · Engineering · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Medicine · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Virology

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