Prostitute Identities

Abstract

This paper is concerned with women's sustained involvement in prostitution. In the late twentieth century it is taken for granted that women's involvement in prostitution can be explained in terms of poverty and/or vulnerability to predatory men. However, closer examination of the stories that prostitute-women recount reveals that their narratives are marked by a paradox that inheres in the contradictory effects of involvement in prostitution and the antithetical representations of prostitution offered by the women. Thus the question arises: how are the contradictions accommodated in a way that permits the women to make sense of (and thus be sustained within) prostitution. This paper focuses on the discursive strategies that the women deployed to do so. One of the key devices is the construction of a prostitute-identity which is constituted within very specific, but shifting, meanings of 'men', 'money' and 'violence'.