The narrative and emotional structures of vulnerability: The case of commercial sex

Feminist theory has advanced vulnerability as a vital framework for conceptualising structural injustice and inequality. Yet, paradoxically, its political and legal deployment frequently entrenches the very oppressive structures it seeks to dismantle. Commercial sex starkly illustrates this contradiction, as political appeals to vulnerability often legitimise paternalistic and punitive policies that expose people who sell sex to heightened risks of exploitation, violence and death. For this reason, I take commercial sex as a case study to examine why and how vulnerability – a framework with significant emancipatory potential – is so often transformed into an instrument of oppression. My contention concerns vulnerability's polysemic nature: vulnerability carries multiple meanings that often become entangled in political discourse, mobilising narrative and emotional structures that elicit punitive responses. To illustrate this, I analyse the hegemonic discourse on commercial sex – feminist abolitionism of the sex trade – whose core claims rest on the notion of structural vulnerability . Yet its framing portrays women who sell sex as devoid of agency and power, casting them as wholly susceptible to harm. This evokes a distinct conception of vulnerability as innocent victimhood , which shapes the underlying hero-protector narrative, thus activating an emotional constellation anchored in moral anger that both favours and legitimises punitive public policies. This article demonstrates that vulnerability operates not only as an ontological or structural condition but also as a discursive mechanism shaped by narratives and emotions, revealing a dimension largely absent from debates on commercial sex and addressing a gap in feminist analyses of vulnerability in this context.