The Ambiguous Taxation of Prostitution: the Role of Fiscal Arrangements in Hindering the Sexual and Economic Citizenship of Sex Workers

This article explores the understudied and undertheorized role that fiscal policies play in shaping the relationship between the state and sex workers. It highlights the importance of looking at tax policy and its implementation to understand how inequality is reinforced against sexually marginalized populations. Drawing on the Italian case, it explores the ways in which ambiguous taxation arrangements operate to penalize sex workers, excluding them from the status of full taxpayer citizenship, and demonizing them as individuals who exploit the fiscal system at the expense of “good” tax-paying citizens. Fiscal policies, I argue, need to be considered in the context of the governance of prostitution as social mechanisms that have the potential to contribute to the sexual and economic citizenship of this marginalized population, but which, when unequal and ambiguous, reinforce the social and political liminality of sex workers as lesser citizens, and add to the stigma, damaging stereotypes and violence already waged against them. The complex ways in which inequality against sex workers is maintained is revealed as a dynamic process that reflects the ever-shifting interplay of economics and morality

Beyond dichotomies: Exploring responses to tackling the sex industry in Nepal.

The sex industry in Nepal has witnessed a massive resurgence, largely due to the expansion of the entertainment sector in the last decade. It is frequently featured in the national media, often with sensationalistic headlines. However, there is only limited research available on the perceptions of support agencies’ efforts in dealing with sex industry in Nepal. This chapter explores the approaches taken by different agencies in Nepal to intervening in the sex industry. The data for the chapter are derived from semi-structured interviews with donor agencies, government offices, I/NGOs, and other anti-trafficking networks. The findings of the chapter delineate that the rights of women and girls to work in a safe and healthy environment have been largely neglected in Nepal. Despite several attempts to regulate the sex industry, the practices employed by support organisations are often limited to controlling measures (rescue, rehabilitation and reintegration model). Such measures often bound up in the choice/coercion and innocent/savvy dichotomies. The chapter emphasises the importance of looking beyond these dichotomies and addressing the labour exploitation and other human rights violations that women and girls are facing in the Nepalese sex industry

‘We should tax sex workers to fund subsidies for families’: shifting affective registers and enduring (sexual) norms in the Italian Northern League’s approach to prostitution

This paper explores changes in the emotional and affective repertoires mobilized by the Northern League, a radical right-wing populist party in Italy, to justify its recent prostitution policy proposal. Having dispensed to alarge extent with the punitive and fearful rhetoric against migrant prostitution that characterized its previous campaigns, under its new leader the Northern League has been calling for the regulation of prostitution and for its profitable taxation. The measures proposed, far from being non-moralistic and ideologically neutral, as they are presented, reinforce awell-established normative dichotomy between potentially dangerous individuals and the supposedly wholesome family

The 'f'oreign prostitute' in contemporary Italy: Gender, sexuality and migration in policy and practice.

This thesis examines discourses, policies and practices underpinning the response to, and governance of, prostitution-related migrations of women in contemporary Italy. It analyzes how Italian socio-political factors, such as national identity construction and political opportunism, and normative values and cultural practices (including historical stigmatization of prostitutes, racialization of the 'ethnic Other' and inferiorization of women) contribute to different understandings of, and responses to, the new presence of migrant women operating in the sex industry in Italy. The study adopts a feminist qualitative research methodology and is primarily based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with a number of diverse third sector organizations that operate in the provision of support services to migrant women in the Italian sex industry, as well as on the investigation of relevant documentary sources. Taking as one of its focal points the analysis of the legal measure that since 1998 has regulated the provision of assistance to women trafficked for sexual purposes, the thesis explores the strategies enacted by the bodies that are in charge of implementing such regulation and the motivations informing them. Furthermore, the complexity and often controversial meanings attached to the phenomenon of 'foreign prostitution' - as it is often described in both public and legal discourse - is explored in relation to discourses invoked in debates initiated in 2002 over the change of the current legislation regulating prostitution in the country. The analysis of these issues shows how dominant historical prejudices against prostitutes and migrants have coalesced in the construction of the image of 'foreign prostitutes' who are subjected to a variety of forms of discipline on the basis of gendered, racialized and sexualized identities ascribed to them. The production and reproduction of socially constructed representations of migrant women who operate in the sex industry in Italy and the political and ideological forces underlying such processes are issues that have received little attention in the literature. In this sense, it is hoped that this research will fill a gap in the existing sociological literature, and allow for a more comprehensive understanding of these issues

Sex work and gendered tax imaginaries

By exploring how the taxation of sex work is interpreted and explained, this article aims to expand theoretical and empirical understandings of tax imaginaries – the collectively formed meanings ascribed to taxes, taxpaying, and the purposes they serve – and how gender is mobilised in their construction. It argues that tax imaginaries created and circulated through online expert commentaries on the taxation of prostitution in Italy discredit sex workers through well-established stigmatising gendered tropes, trivialise the predicaments that they face as taxpayers, and ignore or dismiss systemic ambiguities and discriminations that disadvantage sex workers as citizens. Old prejudices against sex workers are thus reinforced and new ones constituted through these tax imaginaries, while the social inequality and marginalisation experienced by sex workers is obscured

Control creep and the multiple exclusions faced by women in low-autonomy sex industry sectors

his article unites the co-authors’ years of empirical research with women in policed, stigmatized, and low-autonomy sex industry sectors in Brazil, China, Italy, and the United States to identify six prevalent forms of exclusion: economic, intersectional, health, safety, public vilification, and policing. We analyze the distinct manifestations of these exclusionary forces in all four sites to introduce criminal creep as theoretical shorthand for the global seepage of ideological, structural, and interpersonal exclusionary forces into social life, professional practice, and socio-legal procedures that marginalize women in the sex industry as victim- criminals in need of rehabilitation. Uniting and building upon literature on feminist engagement with and critiques of citizenship, conceptual uses of “creep”, carcerality and crimmigration, and critical anti-trafficking studies, we argue that criminal creep facilitates a perfect storm of exclusion that promotes sex workers’ de facto and de jure exclusion from citizenship through a set of wide-ranging set of harms. Furthermore, we identify “control creep” as a factor limiting – even radically – the political organization of and social scientific production regarding the vulnerable populations anti-sex work and anti-trafficking laws are supposedly designed to aid