In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Canada v. Bedford that key prostitution laws were unconstitutional. The decision provoked wide interest but little new insight into sex work.

Red Light Labour addresses Canada’s new legal regime regulating sex work through the analysis of past and present policy approaches and consideration of how laws and those who uphold them have constructed, controlled, and criminalized sex workers, their clients, and their workspaces. This groundbreaking collection also offers nuanced interpretations of commercial sexual labour that foreground the personal perspectives of workers and activists. The contributors highlight the struggle for civic and social inclusion by considering sex workers’ advocacy tactics, successes, and challenges.

Red Light Labour promotes social and economic justice within a sex-work-as-labour framework. This book is a timely intervention that showcases up-to-date legal, policy, and social analysis of sex work in Canada.

Elya M. Durisin's profile page

Emily van der Meulen is a professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. She conducts research in the areas of sex work and human trafficking, prison and community-based harm reduction and gendered and transnational surveillance. She is co-editor of numerous books, including Red Light Labour: Sex Work Regulation, Agency, and Resistance (with Elya M. Durisin and Chris Bruckert), Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories (with Robert Heynen) and Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada (with Kelly Fritsch and Jeffrey Monaghan).

Emily van der Meulen's profile page

Chris Bruckert is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. Since receiving her PhD from Carleton University in 2000, she has devoted herself to researching various sectors of the Canadian adult sex industry through the lens of feminist labour theory. Committed to Sex Worker rights, she endeavours to contribute to the movement as an academic activism.

Chris Bruckert's profile page

A thorough collection, it challenges misconceptions and educates readers on many topics, including sex work in rural and small communities, the experience of Indigenous workers, and union engagement with sex work in Canada.

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