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In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Canada v. Bedford that key prostitution laws were unconstitutional. The decision provoked wide interest but little new insight into sex work.
Red Light Labour addresses Canada’s new legal regime regulating sex work through the analysis of past and present policy approaches and consideration of how laws and those who uphold them have constructed, controlled, and criminalized sex workers, their clients, and their workspaces. This groundbreaking collection also offers nuanced interpretations of commercial sexual labour that foreground the personal perspectives of workers and activists. The contributors highlight the struggle for civic and social inclusion by considering sex workers’ advocacy tactics, successes, and challenges.
Red Light Labour promotes social and economic justice within a sex-work-as-labour framework. This book is a timely intervention that showcases up-to-date legal, policy, and social analysis of sex work in Canada.
Elya M. Durisin holds a PhD in political science from York University. With Emily van der Meulen and Victoria Love, she is the editor of Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Canada. Emily van der Meulen is an associate professor of criminology at Ryerson University. Her edited works include, with Robert Heynen, Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance. Chris Bruckert is a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Taking It Off, Putting It On: Women in the Strip Trade and has edited several works, among them, with Colette Parent, Getting Past “the Pimp”: Management in the Sex Industry.
A thorough collection, it challenges misconceptions and educates readers on many topics, including sex work in rural and small communities, the experience of Indigenous workers, and union engagement with sex work in Canada.