Postcolonial Approaches to Portrayals of Dutch and Migrant Window Sex Workers

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the portrayals of Dutch and migrant window sex workers and analyze how such portrayals are often in contradiction with the actual reality in the window sex work sites. This is done by deploying theories of postcoloniality, using content and discourse analysis, surveying and interviewing, as well as through the use of reports and documents mapping the sex industry scene in the Netherlands. The way such portrayals render invisible issues related to the composition of the Dutch window sex work sites, agency, and complicities of both the national and international community in deteriorating the phenomenon of trafficking by their restrictive immigration policies is also examined. Portrayals of the Dutch window sex work sites as white and Dutch contradict with the actual composition of the very sites where the migrants form a majority. A Dutch window sex worker is portrayed as independent and strong whereas migrant window sex workers are portrayed either by means of illegality, trafficking, or abuse of the B9 procedure. Such binaries ultimately feed into conceptualizations of the migrant window sex workers as ignorant, passive, and poor while the Dutch window sex workers are granted with labels such as emancipation and independence. The power of portrayals to represent Dutch and migrant window sex workers by means of such binaries indeed benefits from a postcolonial analysis, which provides a critical examination of the issues at hand. Furthermore, portrayals of migrant window sex workers tend to render invisible their agency. Solely focusing on the effects of structures and neglecting the power of agency disguises possibilities for transformative practices to fight against asymmetries in power relations on a grassroots level. On the other hand the embracement of agency may neglect the way history has shaped contemporary social reality. However, the ones who often embrace agency are prominently Western based scholars; the embracement of agency in a highly racialized industry can fall in the trap of not acknowledging the way people in the West are structurally implicated subjects and as such may sustain the current world order by not questioning the equality of opportunities.