Le travail du sexe : entretien croisé avec Morgane Merteuil et Thierry Schaffauser

Abstract

A stigma and a labor, prostitution is usually excluded from the world of work. « Work which one cannot endure to look on », prostitution can be both a form of oppression and exploitation and a site for personal strategies and options, even individual freedom. The present fights carried out by prostitutes, whether they call themselves sex workers or not, put at the center of their militant know-how the defense of rights, agency and the ability to negotiate their working conditions in order to promote a sexual economy as egalitarian as possible. In this joint interview, Morgane Merteuil and Thierry Schaffauser, sex worker activists, elucidate the stakes of this fight to call prostitution « sex work ». Based on their activist and professional experience, they offer a definition of sex work from the workers’ ways of saying and ways of doing. That way, they offer a more global reflexion on the blurred borders of work from a feminist, anticapitalist and activist perspective.

Keywords

• feminism
• sex work
• care
• patriarchy
• activism