Understanding Sex for Sale aims to understand how prostitution, sex work or sex for sale are delineated, contested and understood in different spaces, places and times; with a particular focus on identifying how the relation between sex and money is interpreted and enacted.

May-Len Skilbrei is Professor in Criminology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She works within the fields of criminology, gender studies, and sociology of law, and does research on the formulation and implementation of legislation and welfare policies on commercial sex and human trafficking nationally and regionally (the Nordic region), as well as on criminal justice approaches to sexual violence. She has published broadly on these topics.

Marlene Spanger is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. Spanger's research fields include ethnographic fieldwork and discursive formations within the policy fields of prostitution and human trafficking, transnational intimacies and migration with a special attention to gender, sexual and racial issues.

Chapter 1 Speaking about sex for sale historically, spatially and politically

Part I: Historically speaking

May-Len Skilbrei and Marlene Spanger

Chapter 2 What's the problem with prostitution? Shifting problematisations of men and women selling sex

Jens Rydström

Chapter 3 Surveillance of dangerous liaisons through notions of sex and money

Marlene Spanger

Chapter 4 The production and transformation of prostitution spaces: The red light district of Catania

Patrizia Testaí

Part II: Speaking from experience

Chapter 5 Intensive mothering as cultural script: Boundary setting among street-involved women

Kyria Brown, Susan Dewey, and Treena Orchard

Chapter 6 Beyond the client: Exploring men's sexual scripting

Chiara Bertone and Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto

Chapter 7 The Intimate Bazaar of Female Sex Tourism

Marie Bruvik Heinskou

Chapter 8 A 'continuum of sexual economic exchanges' or 'weak agency'? Female migrant sex work in Switzerland

Milena Chimienti and Marylène Lieber

Chapter 9 The Fluidity of a 'Happy Ending': Chinese masseuses in the Netherlands

Marie-Louise Janssen

Chapter 10 The 'Normal' and the 'Other' Woman of Prostitution Policy Debates: New Concerns and Solutions

May-Len Skilbrei

Chapter 11 The gender of trafficking, or why can't men be sex slaves?

Kerwin Kaye

Part III: Speaking about control

Chapter 12 Spatial Justice: how the police craft the city by enforcing law on prostitution

Alexander Kondakov