Selling Sex in Order to Migrate: The End of the Migratory Dream?

Abstract

This article analyses the trajectories of female migrant sex workers in Switzerland, and discusses the ambivalently empowering and disempowering subjective experiences of the people involved in their varying local contexts. It shows that sex work represents, on the one hand, a chance for women to migrate legally, to find work in order to achieve their migratory projects or just to survive. On the other hand it highlights that the link between migration and sex work is emblematic of the cost of entering Europe today, and questions the extent to which migrating through sex work could mean the end of an improvement in quality-of-life through migration. This article gives a differentiated analysis of sex work and the functioning of agency, in order to grasp the mechanisms and conditions of this particular type of migration.

Keywords:

• Female Migration
• Sex Work
• Subjective Experiences
• Empowerment
• Vulnerability
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Firstly, my gratitude goes to Sandro Cattacin for his consistently fruitful comments and encouragement in this research, on which my PhD thesis is based. Secondly, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, where I spent a year as a Visiting Research Fellow and where this paper was written, for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and in particular Russell King—who encouraged me to write this article and whose comments improved the quality of the text, as did those of Nicola Mai and the anonymous reviewers of this article. The paper was presented at an IMISCOE Workshop on ‘Love, Sexuality and Migration’ at the University of Sussex, 14–15 March 2008, organised by Russell and Nicola as part of the work of IMISCOE Cluster C8. Finally, I would like to thank Julia Brown, who undertook the proofreading and improved the clarity of a previous draft, and Jenny Money, who edited this final version.

Notes

1. The so-called B-permit, authorised on the enactment of the bilateral agreements of June 2004.

2. The L-permit is a temporary permit of stay identical to that held by musicians and artists.

3. For push–pull theory see, inter alia, Lee (1966) or Massey et al. (1993); on networks see Bott (1971), Mitchell (1969) or Rogers and Vertovec (1995); and on emotional analysis related to the migration phenomenon see Mai and King (2009).

4. To ensure the anonymity of my informants, while still providing as much information as possible, I coded the interviews as follows: first the region where they work and where I interviewed them—Neuchâtel (NE) or Geneva (GE). I coded more than one region when I interviewed them several times and in different regions, as in the case of informants I followed throughout the whole study. I then indicate the type of premises where they work (strip club, bar or massage parlour), followed by a number denoting whether the person was one of the first interviewees or one of the last. Finally I give the continent of origin of the interviewee (Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America).

5. This is especially the case of women coming from Africa who declared that, as soon as potential household employers discovered they were from a black minority, they lost interest in employing them.

6. The economic variability can be noticed, for instance, by the rapid closure of the premises. During my research, many premises were closed because they went bankrupt, changed location or were inclined to promote a strong turn-over among the sex workers. Regarding the legal variability, the comparative and historical perspectives show that European states’ national regulations on prostitution tend to vary over time in a cyclical way between an abolitionist and a regulatory perspective (Corbin 1978; Outshoorn 2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Milena Chimienti

Milena Chimienti is Lecturer in Sociology at City University, London