Towards a global political economy of sexwork: evidence of Argentina and Costa Rica

Sex and sexuality have largely been left out of considerations of political economy and “sexuality is often placed on the constitutive outside” (Smith 2020: 3) of political economic analyses. Even critical political economy has tended to maintain a dichotomy between sexuality and economy, with the former relegated to the “private” realm and the latter as the public and therefore appropriate for analysis. This is despite important research that has demonstrated the imbrication of the public and the private and challenged the exclusion of sexuality from economic analyses (Zelizer 2007). Furthermore, it is worth remembering that “the illicit and illegal economy is intimately related to, not separable from, the functioning of the ‘formal’ global economy” (Smith 2011: 530-531). Sex work, however, has been an exception to this general rule, representing as it does a site for examining where the sexual and the economic interact. This chapter draws on two case studies - Costa Rica and Argentina - to demonstrate the similarities and divergences in the ways in which sex work is imbricated in national economies. Dependence on foreign capital flows via tourism in Costa Rica shape the inclusion of sex workers’ labour into national balance sheets, while in Argentina, cyclical patterns of crisis and debt restructuring undermine the capacity of sex workers to use the commodification of sexual labour as a safety net for survival.