This article explores the overlooked nexus between taxation and sex work, approaching it as a vehicle for examining the conditions under which sex workers are legible to themselves, the state, and others as full citizens. Bringing together sex work, taxation, and citizenship studies, this is the first study to consider sex workers' perspectives on the fiscal regimes in which they operate and how they negotiate and make sense of the challenges they face in relation to paying taxes. We draw on rich qualitative data collected through interviews with sex workers based in three European contexts with different legal and fiscal approaches to sex work: Italy, Portugal, and the Swiss canton Geneva. The article reveals that taxes play various roles in the lives, experiences, and imaginations of our participants, reflecting different positions and dispositions toward the state and different aspirations and visions of full citizenship. We show that the ability or inability to pay taxes as a sex worker cannot be separated from the wider legal contexts that grant (or not) rights to sex workers and the stigma of sex work that remains pervasive, especially for minoritised groups. Taxation plays an important role in sex workers' lives and in the relationship between sex workers and the state, but it can only be one element of many when considering what full citizenship for sex workers might look like.

By exploring how the taxation of sex work is interpreted and explained, this article aims to expand theoretical and empirical understandings of tax imaginaries - the collectively formed meanings ascribed to taxes, taxpaying, and the purposes they serve - and how gender is mobilised in their construction. It argues that tax imaginaries created and circulated through online expert commentaries on the taxation of prostitution in Italy discredit sex workers through well-established stigmatising gendered tropes, trivialise the predicaments that they face as taxpayers, and ignore or dismiss systemic ambiguities and discriminations that disadvantage sex workers as citizens. Old prejudices against sex workers are thus reinforced and new ones constituted through these tax imaginaries, while the social inequality and marginalisation experienced by sex workers is obscured.

This chapter historically and geopolitically situates the roles and functions of third sector organizations (TSOs) operating in the provision of services to those involved in the sex industry by reviewing some of the most significant developments which have shaped contemporary understandings of and responses to sex for sale. To this end, the chapter is sub-divided into three chronologically ordered sections that capture major political, socioeconomic, and ideological shifts and continuities: the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the central decades of the twentieth century; and finally, recent developments that unfolded since the 1990s.

This article unites the co-authors’ years of empirical research with women in policed, stigmatized, and low-autonomy sex industry sectors in Brazil, China, Italy, and the United States to identify six prevalent forms of exclusion: economic, intersectional, health, safety, public vilification, and policing. We analyze the distinct manifestations of these exclusionary forces in all four sites to introduce criminal creep as theoretical shorthand for the global seepage of ideological, structural, and interpersonal exclusionary forces into social life, professional practice, and socio-legal procedures that marginalize women in the sex industry as victim-criminals in need of rehabilitation. Uniting and building upon literature on feminist engagement with and critiques of citizenship, conceptual uses of “creep”, carcerality and crimmigration, and critical anti-trafficking studies, we argue that criminal creep facilitates a perfect storm of exclusion that promotes sex workers’ de facto and de jure exclusion from citizenship through a set of wide-ranging set of harms. Furthermore, we identify “control creep” as a factor limiting - even radically - the political organization of and social scientific production regarding the vulnerable populations anti-sex work and anti-trafficking laws are supposedly designed to aid.