Resilient Resistances : the self-organization of sex workers against the German Prostitute Protection Act

In 2013, sex workers in Germany began to organize collectively. Through the foundation of the Professional Association for Erotic and Sexual Service Providers, these activists sought to refute victimizing discourses and prevent the introduction of controlling and repressive legislation. Sex worker activists built on the institutionalized structures of the former German whore movement and aimed at preserving the political gains it had achieved through prostitution law reform in 2001. At the same time, sex worker activists established a form of self-organization and self-representation hitherto unknown in Germany. Despite their mobilizations, the Prostitute Protection Act was adopted in 2016 and largely ignored the political demands of sex worker activists. Scholarship examining the collective mobilizations of sex workers is still scarce, and existing works are predominantly pessimistic about their probability, durability, and impact. Scholars furthermore contend that effective policy-making on prostitution is impeded by heavy political contestations and moralization. Moreover, Europe has been the site of a profound shift towards the repression and criminalization of sex work since the turn of the century, and Germany plays a unique role within these processes due to its comparably liberal legal framework on prostitution. In spite of these challenging conditions, the self-organization of sex workers against the German Prostitute Protection Act illustrates that sex workers do operate as collective political actors. However, they remain underexplored as such in the fields of sex work research and social movement studies. Filling this gap in research, this thesis analyse the emergence, development, and outcomes of sex workers’ collective self-organization against the German Prostitute Protection Act. In doing so, I adopt a relational approach which traces the interactions between sex worker activists, their institutional context, and other political actors mobilizing in the field of prostitution politics, and show their relevance to sex workers’ political self-organization. My conceptual framework brings feminist theory into conversation with social movement scholarship. Building on a Foucauldian understanding of power, resistance, and their intimate interrelation, I flesh out the political subjectivities and agency expressed by sex worker activists, while feminist theories of democracy permit me to uncover dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within social movement processes. In order to challenge hierarchical research settings and centre sex worker activists as producers of situated knowledges, my methodological approach departs from feminist epistemologies, complicates the standardization of Participatory Action Research in sex work studies, and instead merges feminist constructivist Grounded Theory with participatory elements. I draw on ethnographic field work mainly conducted between September 2018 and August 2020, and my rich data set triangulates in-depth interviews with participant observation and document analysis. Transporting the reflexive praxis of sex work research into social movement research, I discuss ethical dilemmas I encountered throughout the project. By reconstructing the political process at the micro- and meso-level from the perspective of sex worker activists, my analysis yields crucial results. I first demonstrate how power relations inherent in German prostitution politics produced sex workers as political subjects and agents who resisted victimization and strategically reacted to the political threat presented by the Prostitute Protection Act. While sex worker activists failed in their declared goal of preventing the law, I contend that they succeeded in establishing themselves as political actors, and in building a sustained and diversifying social movement in the face of continued adversities. I then draw attention to the antagonistic dynamic between sex worker activists and anti-prostitution campaigners, and argue that contestation between a marginalized and a hegemonic political actor first spurred the former’s access to the public sphere, and eventually aggravated its political exclusion. Sex worker movements are heterogenous political actors in themselves, and activists’ social locations are shaped by intersecting power relations. I thus direct two intersectional lenses onto the German sex worker movement. First, I examine cooperative and conflictual relations within the sex worker movement, and show how sex worker activists seek to dismantle internal hierarchies by grappling with intersectional political analyses. As part of this, I expand scholarship on protest repertoires by identifying care work as an essentially political practice which ensures both the survival of marginalized communities and the social movements emerging from them. Then, I delineate the manifold and unpredictable coalition building activities which sex worker activist engage in. Here, I indicate that sex worker activists still lack durable political alliances, but show the recent progress made with respect to union organizing. Finally, sex worker activists’ efforts to forge both community and coalitions attest to a growth in intersectional consciousness and practices among them. Contrary to previous academic assessments of sex worker movements, my findings reveal sex worker activists as complex political actors whose collective mobilizations are resilient rather than fragile. In scrutinizing the transforming resistances exerted by sex worker activists, my analysis uncovers historically contingent power formations between state, feminist, and conservative actors in the field of prostitution politics, and stresses the need for relations of solidarity which bridge across the differences within the sex worker movement, as well as those between sex worker activists and other political actors. As such, my findings have further implications for the study of marginalized social movements and contemporary political contestations at the intersection of gender, sexuality, migration, and labour.