I recently organized a session as part of the Prospol COST prostitution research network that explored how sex work and neoliberalization are entangled. Three fantastic speakers presented on the 20th of September 2016 at the Faculty of Political Science of Zagreb University on the following themes:
Prof. Dr. Susan Dewey showed how members of the US criminal justice system and social services interpret the decision-making of women in street sex work as the product of traumatic interpersonal encounters rather than exclusionary socioeconomic realities (see full video).
Prof. Dr. May-Len Skilbrei explored how neoliberalization is invoked by abolitionist scientists to criticize colleagues who analyze prostitution as labor and shortcommings in some analyses that use the concept of agency, problematizing discourses of full un/freedom and full (lack of) choice (see video – sorry, small parts are missing due to a smartphone overheating).
Dr. Lilian Mathieu showed how abolitionist movements increasingly frame their anti-prostitution struggles as anti-globalization/anti-neoliberal despite their own neoliberal arguments (see full video and text).