Concluding Thoughts

Abstract

Throughout this book, I have described the plurality of narratives which constitute Westminster sex-work/prostitution policy debates and situated them within the social and political conditions of their production. In this vein, I have traced the ideological genealogy of participant claims and considered their potential ramifications. I have analysed the impact of contention, as a force which brings speakers together (e.g. with regard to socialisation) and forces them apart (e.g. with regard to gender). And I have demonstrated how relations of power are variously affirmed and challenged through the rearticulation of (counter)hegemonic logics. This has illustrated how various arguments of apparent resistance can borrow from and ingrain hegemonic logics of oppression. In undertaking this task, I have demonstrated that sex-work/prostitution debates are complex—not so much characterised by polarising ideological orthodoxies, but rather by an intricate tapestry of narratives, converging and diverging, entangling, and pulling apart. This has both troubled dominant conceptions of sex-work/prostitution debates as irreconcilably oppositional. With that said, I have remained realistic about the material implications of my findings, particularly those which demonstrate consensus. As I intimated in Chapter 1, critical discursive analysis (in treating the social and political conditions of textual production as its object of study) can inadvertently disembody speakers, subsequently underplaying the degree to which dialogue is an embodied, affective, practice. The clear hostility oppositional policy-actors felt towards one another has stymied attempts to reconcile clearly belligerent political movements and will likely continue to do so. And of course, the fact that interviewed policy-actors continue to disagree vehemently about the desirable ‘solution’ to prostitution, will likely continue to shape debate dynamics.