“Look, we actually do have a brain!” Sex Workers Challenging the Psychomedicalisation of Commercial Sex

Abstract

This article provides an account of the way in which sex workers participate in debates around the interplay of commercial sex and mental health, offering their own definitions of sex work-related psychosocial risks. While previous political sociology literature has reflected on how psychiatric arguments on sex work are mobilised in abolitionist discourses, little has been said about the ways in which sex worker activists participate in this debate and trouble the category of mental health. By examining the interplay between external political conjunctures and transformations within the French sex work movement, the article shows how psychomedical ideas on commercial sex are neither stable nor hegemonic. Instead, they become the very object of credibility struggles. Combining frameworks found in the sociology of public problems frameworks with political sociology of sciences’ analysis, this article aims to shed original light on epistemic injustices which permeate the debate around sex workers' mental health debates.

Keywords: sex work, psychomedicalisation, mental health, credibility struggles.