The Contradictions of Gender, Race, and Justice in U.S. Anti-Prostitution Policy

Selling sexual services has been illegal in most of the US for more than 100 years. Yet recently, anxieties about gender, race, class, and the commodification of intimate life that framed the origin of prostitution laws have reared their heads again in the governance of sex trafficking. In this chapter, we provide an overview of U.S. anti-prostitution policy and map the discourses of gender, race, and justice via three socio-political trends that have emerged over three decades: (1) racial politics and the New Jim Crow; (2) carceral feminism; and (3) neoliberal governance of poor communities. We show how these policies reflect a rhetoric of justice as protecting individual freedom but do so in a way that overlooks class- and race-based structural inequalities.