Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Studies
Advisor
Laura D'Amore, Ph.D.
Abstract
This paper examines how feminist definitions of oppression, autonomy, and sexuality have shaped debates about sex work from the second wave to the third wave. At the center of this debate lies a fundamental question: Is sex work a manifestation of patriarchal domination or a site of women's agency and labor? Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of woman as the Other, I trace how Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin transformed this framework into structural and bodily critiques of patriarchy that positioned sex workers as victims lacking autonomy. I argue that this intellectual lineage helped establish a dominant feminist narrative in which prostitution signifies women’s sexual subordination. Building on this foundation, I analyze sex worker feminist literature—including Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, sex worker contributions in Jill Nagle’s anthology Whores and Other Feminists, and Melinda Chateauvert’s Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk—which challenges this determinism by reframing sexual labor as a site of negotiation, material survival, community, and agency. Through close engagement with both radical feminist theory and sex worker–produced texts, I argue that sex workers have been constructed as the “Other’s Other,” excluded even from feminist movements that claim to resist Othering. My thesis is that centering sex worker voices reveals the limitations of radical feminist frameworks and demonstrates that feminism cannot fully address questions of liberation without recognizing sex workers as political subjects and agents.
Recommended Citation
Bouchard, Jenna, "The Other’s Other Reclaiming Sex Worker Voices Through Feminist Literature" (2025). English Theses. 371.
https://docs.rwu.edu/english_theses/371
