Resistance and Repression: Sex Work and Its Regulation in the United States

Abstract Based on a review of 15 historical monographs, this article provides an overview of the history and regulation of sex work in the United States from the colonial period to the present, focusing on how conditions of state violence shape networks of care. Across time and space, sex workers respond to different regulatory regimes with their own creative strategies for survival and care. For example, in New York, during the mid-nineteenth century teenage “prostitutes” pooled resources and cared for each other when they were ill, and a group of “prostitutes” formed a mutual aid club in 1896. Brothel workers and madams sometimes bailed each other out of jail. “Prostitutes” on the frontier cared for each other in sickness and death, and they helped support each other’s children. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, Black “prostitutes” in New York, like other informal economy workers such as psychics, shared resources and knowledge and cared for one another physically and emotionally, and in 1920s Chicago, some Black sex workers sought autonomy by working in small groups out of shared workplaces. Finally, since the late twentieth century, sex workers have been engaged in various forms of political organizing, harm reduction, and mutual aid. This shows how conditions of violence engender creative resistance, and how, in turn, states respond to novel forms of resistance with new forms of repression.