Feminism, Prostitution and the State: The Politics of Neo-abolitionism by Ward Eilís & Wylie Gillian

Author:Ward, Eilís & Wylie, Gillian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Conclusion

This chapter charted the evolution of abolitionism to neo-abolitionism in the United States. Neo-abolitionism undoubtedly achieved many of its advocates’ aims in the last decades with lasting impact but as indicated above, while the ‘rescue industry’ and ‘treatment industrial complex’ deploy anti-prostitution tactics, the shiny façade of neo-abolitionism may be cracking. On one hand, the neo-abolitionist focus on individual victims and individual perpetrators has been a key component of neoliberal culture and politics, rebranding various social problems connected to poverty, migration and labour rights as individual moral problems while expanding the criminal justice system (and now social services) to increase monitoring and control of marginalised populations (Bernstein 2012; Chuang 2014; Brennan 2008). While sex worker rights movements cast prostitutes as responsible, self-sufficient, sex workers, neo-abolitionist movements and their military humanism and carceral feminism (Bernstein 2010) have placed the prostitute back into the category of victim (Fitzgerald 2015a). On the other hand, the sexual politics of neoliberalism are contradictory, and it remains to be seen how the political power of religious, feminist (pro- and anti-prostitution), and conservative groups will continue to impact prostitution politics in the United States.

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