Global Neoliberal Governance And The Sex Industry – A Match Made In Heaven: Exposing the paradox of modern day gender equality through the eyes of erotic dancers in Great Britain

Abstract

In this thesis I research the relationship between the global political economy and the global sex industry. I am interested in how women are turned into commodities, objects, subjects or abjects through the process of commodification, subjectivation and objectivation in our so-called free, equal and liberal democracies. I will attempt to investigate how the Foucauldian concepts of “bio-power” and “bio-politics” are used in global neoliberal governance, and how through these measures human beings are governed, or rather disciplined and controlled, and how this in turn creates, supports, and maintains the global sex industry and the multiple inequalities it feeds on. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how the neoliberal world order and global governance create the space in which the global sex industry operates. I will attempt to show how neoliberal global governance creates global, gendered and ethnic inequalities, which in turn make the global political economy of sex possible. In other words, how global governance subjectivates individually and collectively to create different types of subject positions in a given society and in the global political economy as a whole. My primary research material will comprise of interviews and informal conversations with erotic dancers and their customers, (including observations) at one particular gentlemen's club in Brighton, the United Kingdom. The methodology I chose is ethnography, which combines several methods that are useful and necessary for conducting this type of fieldwork research, such as various types of interviewing and observations. The theoretical foundation is built upon previous research done on the topic, with my specific focus using the works of Michel Foucault and others as a lens.