'It's Just Acting': Sex Workers' Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality

This article reports on an ethnographic study of female sex workers in Britain who work in the indoor prostitution markets. The empirical find-ings contribute to the sex-as-labour debate and add to the sociological lit-erature regarding the gendered and sexualized nature of employment, particularly the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work. Ground-ing the empirical findings in the theory of identity management and emo-tional labour and work, the article reviews some of the existing examples of how sex workers create emotion management strategies and describes an additional strategy, that of the ‘manufactured identity’. I argue that sex workers create a manufactured identity specifically for the workplace as a self-protection mechanism to manage the stresses of selling sex as well as crafting the work image as a business strategy to attract and maintain cli-entele. Drawing on comparisons between sex work and other feminized service occupations, I argue that sex workers who are involved in prosti-tution under certain conditions are able to capitalize on their own sexuality through the construction of a manufactured identity. The process of con-forming to heterosexualized images in prostitution is conceptualized as not simply accepting dominant discourses but as a calculated response made by sex workers to manipulate the erotic expectations and the cultural ideals of the male client.