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This chapter develops analytical and comparative approaches on the advance of the sexual exploitation industry in Eurozone countries, addressing specific regulations and norms on what is called sex work (when regulated by the state) or prostitution (countries with abolitionist normative frameworks). Indeed, in scenarios of economic and health recession due to Covid-19, this issue is controversial and of urgency in the public agenda due to the scarcity of statistical records that can account for the impact of the sexual exploitation market on women and feminized bodies and in relation to gender equality and equity indexes, as well as public policies. As a working assumption, it is proposed that there is a “sociological erasure” on the impact of the sexual exploitation industry on populations of high social vulnerability. Methodologically, on the one hand, a comparative analysis of indicators relevant to gender equality and human rights is developed, using second-order data to compare European countries with antagonistic legal regulations on the sex market. On the other hand, the perceptions, discourses and representations of experts in the field and key informants related to the sex market are analyzed. Finally, it is concluded that coercive prostitution affects feminized corporalities, especially migrant and poor women. Therefore, prostitution should be considered a violation of human rights and should be evidenced as an emergent of gender violence. Information and analysis regarding this industry are required to know how to intervene and contribute to reach new levels of gender equality, and to provide timely assistance to those who need it, according to the objectives for the Eurozone established in agreement with UNICEF’s global Goal 5.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

Drawing on ethnographic field research on female sex workers and male clients in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s global sex industry, this paper complicates our understanding of human trafficking in two ways. First, introducing the term perverse humanitarianism, the paper extends work on carceral feminism by offering concrete examples of interagency commitments between NGOs and the police. Second, my ethnography reveals that women framed their relationships with male clients as mutually beneficial because the men provided them with alternate pathways to economic mobility outside of sex work. Drawing on the same tropes of victimhood employed by the NGOs, sex workers elicited sympathy from male clients that they leveraged into gifts of money. Using men’s charitable gifts, many women became small entrepreneurs who opened local businesses and empowered other sex workers far beyond what NGOs were able to provide.

Studying Cuban urban agriculture is important because empirically investigating existing, innovative projects geared toward sustainability can illuminate the processes that facilitate and inhibit environmental reform. I assess the social costs and benefits, achievements, and ongoing challenges at one urban farm. I highlight the interconnection of societal institutions – including gender relationships and gendered economic structures – that can foster or undermine sustainability projects. My analysis of the social dimensions of environmental problems is based on Ariel Salleh’s theoretical work. She argues that women’s invisible reproductive labor mediates paid labor by maintaining the viability of such labor. My contribution is to add an empirical dimension to her work.

To assess the challenges of urban sustainability, I spent two months conducting participant observation and semi-structured interviews with workers at an urban farm in Havana, Cuba.

I find that culturally prescribed gender divisions of labor are entrenched in Cuban urban agriculture. Women continue to do most of the important, yet unacknowledged, domestic work that maintains the health of agricultural labor. Additionally, the heavier burdens women experience during the second shift restrict their ability to participate in local democratic decision-making processes, thereby limiting their capacity to modify oppressive cultural norms and maintaining the status quo.

Socially just environmental change does not automatically happen when the barriers of capitalism are removed, even if the society bases economic progress on increasing quality of life rather than profit. Instead, socially just environmental change must be a deliberate process that is constantly negotiated, reassessed, and prioritized.

The inherent violence of the patriarchal spectacle is at times decried through mass social movements such as the #MeToo or black lives matter movements in response to overt political displays of power or policies reinforcing inequalities of gender, race and ethnicity. While critical criminologists and feminists have spent decades on topics such as these, what is, more often than not, ignored is the banal patriarchal oppression women across the globe endure during their everyday lives. Moreover, women, most notably in the Global North and the United States in particular, assent to their oppression through the willingness of allowing the innate violence of an unequal patriarchal system of harm and violence. Our specific focus is on the routinisation of everyday life women participate in reinforcing the status quo of the patriarchal carceral state. We also suggest that social change must be more than reactions and demands for processes of change within the social structure that maintain the overall patriarchal state and structure of society: rather resistance must equal revulsion and rejection for a revolutionary social change to the innate violent system.

Purpose – To understand women's participation in domestic and global sex (entertainment) industries in South Korea, this study proposes an integrative theoretical framework of political economy with three analytical dimensions: position in the world-system, local patriarchy, and the state policies.

Method/approach – The theory that seeks to understand the South Korean government's policy on prostitution is formulated based on reviews of transnational and global research on gender and sex work, local patriarchy, and political economy of world-system. Two historical examples of the sex industry, businesses near U.S. military camps on the Korean peninsula and Korean prostitutes in several cities of Japan, are used to illustrate the theory. The data for these cases were collected from a variety of sources including government and nongovernment documents, newspaper articles, film, and demographic information.

Findings – The application of the theoretical frame makes it possible to understand the socioeconomic and political contexts in which South Korean society, as a semiperipheral nation, has produced a vast number of women in the sex industry.

Practical implications – When the government's policy emphasizes rapid economic growth viewing women as a source of revenue, it will be difficult to understand marginalization of women's status in informal sectors and massive production of prostitutes in domestic and transnational scale.

Value of study – Using a macro and structural perspective, this study sheds light on the transnational/global nature of the prostitution industry, and specifically the role of the state, and local patriarchy in the globalizing South Korean sex industry.