'Business before pleasure': the golden rule of sex work, payment schedules and gendered experiences of violence.
A widespread rule of sex work is that payment occurs before service provision. Drawing on a subset of data collected as part of an ethnographic study conducted in metro Vancouver, Canada, this paper explores the temporal and gendered connections between payment and financial violence in a semi-criminalised indoor sex industry. A detailed examination of the timing of payment with 51 independent indoor sex workers reveals the gendered nature of the violence and its direct connection to anti-violence strategies indoor sex workers employ. We found that women (including transgender women) (n = 26) and men (n = 25) use payment schedules to minimise potential violence, but in divergent ways. Sex workers adhere to, negotiate and reject the golden rule of payment in advance based on different experiences of gendered violence. Through a gendered relational analysis, we show the contextual relationship between men and women as they negotiate payment schedules in their sex work interactions. These findings offer insight into the significance that the timing of payment has in sex workers' anti-violence practices.
a School of Nursing , University of British Columbia , Vancouver , Canada.
Elizabeth
E
Manning
a School of Nursing , University of British Columbia , Vancouver , Canada.
Vicky
V
Bungay
D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D001955:British Columbia; D003132:Commerce / Q000191:economics*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D057181:Pleasure; D060386:Sex Workers / Q000523:psychology*; D013997:Time Factors; D014754:Violence / Q000517:prevention & control*
Canada; Gender; finance; payment; sex work; time; violence