Reframing Prostitution Analysis

A Critical Summary Analysis of “Reframing Prostitution as work” by Deborah Brock and “Prostitution in Vancouver: Pimping women and the colonization of First Nations” by Melissa Farley and Jacqueline Lynn

Summary:

(112)Brock’s (2012) article defines the ever-changing shift anti-prostitution campaigns changes in relation to the “marketplace” of prostitution in terms of labels put on the industry. Brock (2012) argues that Canadian patriarchal culture has created new labels for the business of prostitution in an effort to avoid the penalties of the law. These activist barriers to legal and social definitions of prostitution are important variables in the effort to build campaigns that will thwart these methods of “marketplace” manipulation of
In this manner, campaigns against prostitution have been divided on the “meaning” of the organizational approach to what strategies will be used to overcome the ever-changing terminology of prostitution: “As always, political struggles over law evoke political struggles over meaning. The struggle over the meaning of sex work has been nowhere more heated than within feminism” (246). In this manner, the broader fight against prostitution can be consulted in the differing methods of protest used against the changing terms of prostitution (escort services, massage parlors. etc.) that circumvent the moral issue. In contrast to this view, Farley and Lynne (2004) choose to focus on the specific effects of colonization in relation to First Nations women and the exploration of the colonized by the colonizer. In this manner, the historical context of prostitution originates in the colonial economy: “Colonizers used First Nations women as domestic servants (including sexual servants) and as objects to provide sex acts to First Nations men in order to offer incentive to the men to remain in labor bondage” (Farley and Lynne 111). In this manner, Farley and Lynne utilize a different approach to prostitution than does Brock (2012) in the
In Brock’s (2012) view, the evolution of prostitution was not only racial, but focused on the class-status of white women that made it possible for white men to exploit them through prostitution, In a similar way, Farley and Lynne (2004) show the immoral and heinous realities of european colonization and the exploitation of indigenous women into the profession of prostitution. Most shockingly, these traditions extend into modern Canadian society. These two articles provide a powerful historical examination of the struggle for women to free themselves from the patriarchal bonds of prostitution in the 21st