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Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk. BY MELINDA CHATEAUVERT. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. Pp. 263. $26.95 (cloth).
Sex workers in the United States and in many other places around the world have been fighting against stigmatization and criminalization for a ver y long time. In her timely, brave book, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk, Melinda Chateauvert chronicles stories about grassroots organizing by sex work activists over the past five decades. Training her lens on the United States and its long, ugly history of whorephobia and slut shaming, Chateauvert punctures the one-dimensional caricature of sex workers as victims and objects of men's lust; instead, she reframes "working girls and boys" as fierce fighters and scrappers for sexual freedom and human rights in the absence of sustained solidarity or resources from feminist, gay rights, labor, or African American movements.
Throughout her brilliantly titled chapters-"Those Few Came on like Gangbusters," "My Ass Is Mine," "Resisting the Virus of Repression," "Assembly-Line Orgasms," and "Fuck the Pigs"-Chateauvert impressively analyzes the stratifications internal to the sex industry along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and citizenship. Making the case that participation in commercial sex may be the result of choice, circumstance, or coercion, she notes how homeless folks, trans people of color, and un- documented migrants have hustled sex-"the one form of labor capital they possess"-to secure housing, clothes, medical supplies, and physical safety "in a nation that does not affirm a human right to shelter, food, or healthcare" (4). For many, sex work has meant high-risk activity, especially for street-involved participants. Chateauvert sensitively excavates the "civil deaths" of "hos and hustlers" via street sweeps, arrests, police violence, censorship laws, and discrimination in "square" employment and...