Your World of Legal Intelligence
 United Kingdom | +44 (0) 20 7284 8080

Jane Scoular, The Subject of Prostitution: Sex Work, Law and Social Theory

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorMay-Len Skilbrei
DOI10.1177/1462474517741246
Published date01 April 2019
Date01 April 2019
Subject MatterBook reviews
untitled 256
Punishment & Society 21(2)
Jane Scoular, The Subject of Prostitution: Sex Work, Law and Social Theory, Routledge:
Abingdon, UK, 2015; 189 pp.: 9781904385516, £110 (hbk), £37.99 (pbk)
In the last 10 years, Jane Scoular has been a sex work scholar to pay attention to.
With a background in law, she has brought much needed insights into stale debates
over which prostitution polices are ‘best’. Scoular argues that law is not only
interesting in its ability to stop and punish crime in a direct sense but just as
much in how it normalizes also the ‘outside’ of what it regulates. Building on
Nikolas Rose and Mariana Valverde’s (1998) reading of Foucault, she treats law
as something that takes part in the formation of subjects, authorizes ways of
looking and acting also outside of criminal justice institutions and divides public
concerns from private interests. The background for Scoular’s ambition to inves-
tigate how law operates in the case of prostitution is how many social scientists
evaluate laws according to whether or not they work in a narrow and shallow
sense, and Scoular encourages us to look wider and deeper when we attempt to
answer that question. Her book, The Subject of Prostitution: Sex Work, Law and
Social Theory, was therefore a highly anticipated contribution to prostitution or
sex work scholarship. In the book, she brings together some points and arguments
also made elsewhere, but here she deepens them, elaborates on new examples and
brings them together in a way that gives readers a great overview over relevant
issues to do with how law matters in contemporary sex work (p. 2).
The book is organized around three very different examples that shed light on
what law does. She describes what she does with these examples to be a selective
genealogy (p. 20) where she starts in the particularity of each case before moving
onwards to more general expression of the same.
The first case is how prostitution was problematized in the Victorian age. In this
period, prostitution became a...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT