Social stratification in Singapore's sex industry

Abstract

Much of research around the sex industry focuses on its regulation, organization, and social construction as deviant behaviour. The literature neglects to ask meaningful questions about the complex inequality present in the sex industry – and how sex workers’ lives are shaped and transformed through their participation in the industry. This thesis examines the stratifications and social hierarchies of the sex industry that structure sex workers’ social locations along lines of nationality, gender, race, class, age, and disability. These stratifications and social hierarchies have important implications in relation to patterns of inequality around exclusion, space, exploitation, safety, earning potential, and negotiating power for sex workers. This thesis explores trajectories of social and economic mobility where sex work is highlighted as an important avenue for income generation, giving way to new consumption practices for workers and their families. Tracing friendships and social networks also point to important resources of cultural and social capital for sex workers, including presenting possibilities of care and resistance to stigma, discrimination, and exclusion – although the transient and fraught nature of such social ties may give way to practices of gatekeeping and co-ethnic exploitation that hinge on asymmetries of power and resources. While there is a breadth of resources for sex workers in relation to social support and sexual health, receiving assistance may be insufficient – short-lived, issue-specific, contingent on one’s departure from sex work, and imbricated in other labour issues. The narratives of sex workers emphasise their autonomy and independence as their self-constructions cast them as female breadwinners, mothers, caregivers, and economically productive and self-sufficient individuals. In doing so, it expands scholarship on intimate industries where work is differentially constructed, valued, regulated, and policed. The thesis extends social stratification and occupational inequality literature by nuancing research on social hierarchies within and outside of the social space of the sex industry is classed, gendered, racialised, ableist, and subject to social differences like nationality and sexuality. Through explicating sex workers’ narratives and self-constructions, it contributes to understandings and counter-cultural possibilities of sex work as licit and legitimate in Singapore.