Representations and Re-presentations of Sex Work

Volume 1 of the book series “Studien zu Sexarbeit und Prostitution | Studies on Sex Work and Prostitution”

Sex work is a socio-political field marked by polarisation. Public debates, academic discourses and political regulations are often shaped by emotive ascriptions, moral judgements and simplified claims to representation that obscure the diverse lived and working realities of sex workers — whether through feminist controversies, media scandalisation or aesthetic stylisation. Such representations manifest themselves in social orders and moral imaginaries, regulations and laws, as well as in discourses, narratives, visual figurations and associations in the media, politics, academia and artistic production. They are accompanied by latent curiosity, strong emotions and forms of moral politics. The resulting stigmatisation, criminalisation, discrimination and stereotypical homogenisation — both visual and discursive — continue to shape the lived realities of many sex workers today. These relations of oppression — particularly along the lines of class, race, gender, sexuality or the body (Martini 2025; Künkel 2007; Probst 2022; Thiemann 2020) — are produced and reproduced in and through politics, academia, the media and everyday life, including by sex workers themselves.

Against this background, this interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary edited volume invites contributions that examine the representation of sex workers and sex work from historical, contemporary, and utopian perspectives. Possible contributions may be developed in relation to the following questions, which are explicitly not intended to be exhaustive:

• Who speaks, how, and with what consequences, for themselves or for sex workers? How, and by whom, are acts of representation by sex workers made visible or invisible?
• Whose voices are heard, whose are excluded — and why?
• Who has been able, or is able, to intervene in the existing regime of representation, how, and with what consequences?
• How can the different perspectives of actors in the field of sex work, as well as media, artistic, political or institutional engagements with the field, be combined, bridged or mutually translated into one another?
• How have institutional perspectives on and representations of sex work developed? How did, and how do, they change?
• How can empirical research address normative questions and the positionality of researchers?
• What possibilities exist for participatory and collaborative research with sex workers? What does “participatory” and “collaborative” research mean in this field?
• How can approaches informed by critiques of representation and knowledge, as well as non-Eurocentric and decolonial theoretical and methodological frameworks, be productively used in sex work research?
• What might innovative forms of knowledge production and representation look like, for instance beyond text or beyond a single language?
• In view of the highly polarised representations of sex work, how can public processes of evaluation and decision-making be organised in such a way that well-considered regulations can be developed?
• How do regulations, spatial location, media representations, research and technological or digital developments, among other factors, change the possibilities for self-representation and/or political agency? What alternatives to dominant representations, and to the consequences associated with them for sex workers, already exist, and how might they be further developed or rewoven?

We welcome academic analyses, methodological reflections, as well as activist, essayistic, artistic, art-based, and multimodal (beyond-text) formats. Contributions by sex workers, activists and researchers occupying multiple roles are especially welcome.

Interested contributors are invited to submit proposals in the form of an abstract of 300 to 500 words, together with a short biographical note, by 15 July 2026 via email to Arne Dreßler (arne.dressler@uni-hamburg.de), Marlen Löffler (marlen-simone.loeffler@iu.org), Sabrina Stranzl (stranzl@if k.ac.at) or Lisa Waegerle (Lisa.Waegerle@hs-bochum.de).

Responses will be sent by the end of August 2026. In the event of a positive response, the deadline for completed contributions of 20,000–35,000 characters including spaces will be the end of February 2027. The edited volume will be published by Springer Verlag in the series “Studien zu Sexarbeit und Prostitution | Studies on Sex Work and Prostitution”. Academic contributions will undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Arts-based research, artistic, essayistic, activist and multimodal contributions will undergo a separate, format-sensitive review process conducted by the editors, drawing on expertise from artistic and practice-based fields.