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Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion. By Robert M. Fishman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 288p. $105.00 cloth, $31.95 paper.

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then make further choices about how to approach this work, with the recognition that their strategies affect both their short-term objectives of earning a living and caring for family and… Click to show full abstract

then make further choices about how to approach this work, with the recognition that their strategies affect both their short-term objectives of earning a living and caring for family and their long-term goal of achieving security by marrying or finding other well-paid work.Many implicitly recognize that in order to succeed they cannot fundamentally challenge existing neoliberal or gender structures, so they adjust their behavior and appearance to play into perceived male desires and to attempt to cross socioeconomic boundaries. Although some sex workers embrace neoliberal thinking and an entrepreneurial approach (what Česnulyt_ e terms a “logic of accumulation”), using profits from sex work to fund higher education or provide investment capital for small businesses, many others are only able to focus on their day-to-day survival (a “logic of livelihood”) due to the precarity of their situations (p. 72). Even those who do have big dreams often find that exiting commercial sex work on one’s own terms is a difficult task because of the financial outlays required to attract better clients, the likelihood of pregnancy, the lure of alcohol and drugs, the threat of violence, and the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. Ultimately, Česnulyt_ e is concerned with the interplay of structure and agency in explaining the behavior and beliefs of women who sell sex—the ways in which neoliberal policies and traditional gender norms jointly narrow the set of options available to many women, leaving them to exercise their agency by choosing among a set of unappealing alternatives. Although marginalized women in neoliberal systems do have options other than selling sex, many are drawn into the commercial sex industry because it offers the potential for higher pay and greater flexibility than other forms of low-skilled work to which women have access, even as it frequently traps these women in “survival circuits” (p. 39). Česnulyt_ e provides a thorough and thoughtful discussion of her research design and methods. She embraces a grounded theory approach, building theoretical insights from rich qualitative data primarily drawn from in-depth interviews with sex workers, sex worker activists, academics, and NGO and social services staff in Mombasa and in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Her ability to gain access to and have open conversations with women working in an illegal trade is a testament to the care with which she approached this research, first building connections through a local NGO that provides support to sex workers and then working with a research assistant who had existing ties to the sex worker community. Česnulyt_ e built rapport with her research participants by getting to know them in social contexts and interviewing them in spaces in which they felt comfortable, and she took an open-ended approach that allowed her interviewees to tell their stories in their own words. Crucially, Česnulyt_ e also details how she navigated ethical questions associated with interviewing research participants who were engaged in illegal activities and who were members of vulnerable populations. Yet the book would have benefited from similar attention to the particular ethical considerations associated with interviewing research participants who experienced trauma while performing sex work and in their prior lives—in particular, from a discussion of the particular strategies Česnulyt_ e used to minimize the chances that conversations about past trauma might retraumatize her interviewees. The richness of Česnulyt_ e’s interview data is nonetheless impressive, though she does make something of an analytical leap when interpreting it. Although she argues that Kenya’s embrace of neoliberal policy and ideology constrains women’s choices, thereby pushing them to seek out sex work and shaping their strategies as sex workers, her interviewees certainly do not discuss neoliberalism and its consequences explicitly. Instead, they focus more generally on poverty, a lack of education, and family conflict as drivers of their income-generating strategies, and it is Česnulyt_ e who links these proximate factors to an ultimate neoliberal source. Although it is not surprising that neoliberalism is not a buzzword for Česnulyt_ e’s interviewees, she would be better positioned to link their words to this concept if she could leverage some source of variation in the embrace of neoliberalism; that is, if we could see that women’s choices and strategies changed after the introduction of neoliberal policy and discourse or that women’s choices and strategies were different in a country that had not been as influenced by neoliberalism as Kenya. As it stands, without variation in the key independent variable, and without her interviewees drawing the causal link themselves and attributing their actions to neoliberalism, this broader theoretical argument becomes a harder sell. Nonetheless, Česnulyt_ e does tell a persuasive story from sex workers’ perspective about the constrained circumstances many women in the Global South face as a consequence of socioeconomic and gender inequality and about the choices they make within those circumstances to try to better their own lives and the lives of their families. As such, the book should be of great interest to political economy, development, and gender politics scholars.

Keywords: neoliberalism; sex work; sex; research; work; sex workers

Journal Title: Perspectives on Politics
Year Published: 2021

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