All are invited to attend Visiting Professor Katie Cruz (University of Bristol Law School) for a talk on the rights of sex workers.
Over the past 30 years, the demand for sex workers’ rights has gained momentum. In this talk, I apply a Marxist feminist legal approach to the use of rights by sex workers. Liberal legal rights must, I argue, be assessed historically and contextually according to their potential to chip away at the unfreedom (dispossession and dehumanisation) of workers that capitalism tends towards. Using England as a case study I sketch out the possibilities and limits of a particular civil rights strategy (the right to privacy) for limiting sex workers’ unfreedom.