Livable Intersections: ReFraming Sex Work at the Frontline by Sara M. Kallock

Author:Sara M. Kallock [Kallock, Sara M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Economy, Social Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781786604491
Google: KOTaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2019-01-28T10:43:51+00:00

5

Frames of Empowerment

The previous chapter shows how institutional trends, structures, and directives constrain the framing practices of frontline support projects by procedurally shaping how they set their budgets and priorities, who they work with among the frontline bureaucracy, how they measure efficacy, and how much wriggle room they have in designing and delivering services. In this chapter, I consider how the policy framescape discussed in chapter 3 is filtered through the institutional matrix to engender specific and routine performative frameworks through which projects and practitioners develop and deliver services—what I call the frames of “empowerment.” This was a term deployed by all the projects that carries different meanings and imperatives for each, thus belying their normative commitments.

Under livability, empowerment should consist in efforts to shift the personal and political horizons in new directions, directions that would allow abnormative subjects, such as sex workers, to secure their physical and psychical survival, and to collectively and individually contest the normative terms of recognition and moral legitimacy of their social milieu. However, as I analyzed the data, a spectrum of empowerment framings buttressed by two distinct perspectives emerged: On one end of the spectrum lies practical empowerment, which holds that empowerment is achieved by meeting the practical needs of service users; on the other end of the spectrum lies lifestyle empowerment, which holds that empowerment is achieved by enabling sex workers to make radical changes to their lifestyles.

Medical Model

Both practical and lifestyle empowerment are a response to a model of service delivery known as the “medical model,” which dominates the health professions and has only recently carried over into social support services. Like the positivist paradigm of the natural sciences, the medical model is characterized by an emphasis on diagnostic categorization—the ability of professionals to engage in objective examination, and confidence in the ability of examinations to yield effective treatment recommendations. In her analysis of health and social work approaches to intimate violence, Bumiller (2008) describes a mode of service delivery that attends to the service user in terms of diagnosis and therapeutic assessment. The point of such treatment is to identify pathological tendencies in the individual—to identify what is wrong with her and offer treatments that address those symptoms. For Bumiller, ideas about how to best interact with a client “follow from already defined expectations about their problems, needs, and pattern of recovery” (68). This orientation toward the lives of service users construes the “duty of care” to “getting at a correct diagnosis and treatment plan [through] an objective reading of the symptoms” (79).

When engaging with a service user, the primary concern of the practitioner is finding out what symptoms are relevant to her category, thereby displacing a consideration of the complex environmental and ideological factors shaping a service user’s experience. This approach not only leads to highly impersonal interactions; it also compels service users to adopt the language of “rational explanation” to understand their own situation and choice. Such language lends itself to data collection and analysis, but alienates a user’s self-understanding from the historical and political forces shaping her experience.

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