Abstract
Between 1998 and 2004, contentious debates about prostitution increasingly disrupted international events ranging from the World Cup and the Olympics to meetings of the International Labor Organization, the European Union, and the United Nations. These debates took a harsh edge amid rising global concern about human trafficking, an issue whose relationship to prostitution was itself sharply contested. This time period at the start of the millennium marked the beginning of what I call the new prostitution politics. I argue that very different ways of doing prostitution politics reflect very different understandings of community protections against vulnerability that are embedded in welfare state regimes. Prostitution became the focus of widespread cultural politics: disputes over the meanings of fundamental aspects of social life. Amid widespread anxieties that globalization eroded national cultural differences, prostitutes came to symbolize the ability of nations to preserve their values and police their borders, and the efficacy of transnational politics to solve global problems. Harsh intergovernmental criticism, broad media coverage, and public interest are just some of the emblematic features of these new prostitution politics, epitomized by the events before the 2004 Summer Olympics.
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Notes
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Mattson, G. (2016). Governing Loose Women: The New Politics of Prostitution. In: The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137517173_1
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