The Construction of 'Acceptable' Sex Work In New Zealand News Media
Gwyn Easterbrook , Smith
The Construction of 'Acceptable' Sex Work In New Zealand News Media
Gwyn Easterbrook , Smith
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Description
In 2003 New Zealand passed the Prostitution Reform Act, decriminalising sex work andassociated activities. This thesis examines news media representations of sex work andworkers from 2010 to 2016 to determine how these texts construct sex work in a postdecriminalisationenvironment. The key questions this thesis considers are: which sexworkers are presented by journalists as acceptable, and what conditions are attached tothat acceptability? Using media studies frameworks to analyse the texts, this thesisdemonstrates that in a decrimininalised environment the media plays a regulatory role, withthe power to dictate what modes of sex work are acceptable largely shifting away from thecourts. In the absence of a debate about the il/legality of sex work, a different kind ofbinaristic construction emerges, frequently related to public visibility or invisibility.This thesis uses discourse analysis techniques to examine texts relating to three key mediaevents: the repeated attempts legally restrict where street sex workers could work in SouthAuckland, texts about migrant sex workers around the time of the Rugby World Cup, andtexts about independent or agency-based sex workers. My methodology involved examiningthe texts to establish who was situated as an expert through discourse representation, whatwords were used to describe sex workers and their jobs, and then discerning whatnarratives recurred in the texts about each event.