In the early twentieth century, abolitionists sought to stamp out sex work by penalizing all involved. In the generation that followed, neo-abolitionists looked at the sex industry from a feminist perspective, claiming that workers were victims caught in a patriarchal matrix. Yet both agreed that the industry was a destructive and corrupting force that should be eliminated. In this radical volume, five academics and activists convey their vision of prostitution as work, reclaiming the place of sex workers in the discussion of their lives and their work, and opposing discourses that position them as merely victims without agency.

Colette Parent is a professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.

Colette Parent'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.

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Patrice Corriveau is assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa and the author of La répression juridique des homosexuels au Québec et en France.

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Maria Nengeh Mensah's profile page

Louise Toupin lives in Montréal, Québec. She has taught political science at Université du Québec à Montréal. She was a member of the Québec Women’s Liberation Front (1969-71) and co-authored numerous anthologies of activist and feminist writings. She is notably the author of Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-77 (Remue-ménage 2014). The book has been translated into English (UBC/Pluto Press, 2018), Spanish (Tiempo Robado, 2022), German (Unrast, 2022), Italian (Ombre Corte, 2023), and Korean, (Nanjang, 2024).

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Kathe Roth was born in Montréal and now lives in Saint-Lazare, Québec. She has been a literary translator and editor for more than twenty-five years. Her work includes over thirty translated books and essays of literary non-fiction on various subjects, including art, architecture, economics, history, and sociology, as well as fiction. She was a finalist for the Governor General Award for literary translation in 1993 for “The Last Cod Fish” by Pol Chantraine. She is a member of the Literary Translators Association of Canada.

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