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>A comparative cultural study of street prostitutes and sexual minorities in Canada. Pierre Bourdieu: Theorizing public pedagogy in the pursuit of realist ideals.
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A comparative cultural study of street prostitutes and sexual minorities in Canada. Pierre Bourdieu: Theorizing public pedagogy in the pursuit of realist ideals.
This dissertation analyzes the sociocultural position of sex workers and sexual minorities in Canadian society. It theorizes the parallel experiences of the two groups with the aim of creating a public pedagogy model that can be employed to improve the daily lives of sex workers. An important contention of the study is that successful social advocacy programs conducted by gays and lesbians provide important lessons for prostitution advocacy groups who try to achieve positive social change for prostitutes. A case study of same-sex marriage advocacy in Canada is presented as an example of a public pedagogy successfully employed as a tool for social change. Gays and lesbians are theorized as a collective intellectual ideally positioned to lead an emerging gender-sexuality field, which is theorized as an emancipatory public pedagogy---invigorated by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Henry Giroux---that can work for sexual minority advocacy initiatives. Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical constructs, including symbolic violence, habitus, cultural arbitraries, field, and capital, are applied to a discussion of the historical and contemporary social, cultural, and political forces that control the position and lived experiences of sex workers and sexual minorities: Bourdieu's constructs help to explain why social change is difficult but not impossible to achieve. Sex worker discourses are offered to explain how sex work can be both debilitating and empowering. Feminist perspectives are reviewed to explain why radical feminist theories can be harmful to the daily lives of sex workers and sexual minorities. Alternative feminist perspectives, including the work of Kari Kesler and Judith Butler, are theorized as life-affirming for prostitutes and sexual minorities. Heterosexuality and religion are presented as historical and contemporary adversaries of the emerging gender-sexuality field. The various legal responses to prostitution---criminalization, regulation, abolitionism, and decriminalization---are evaluated. The study concludes that the Canadian justice system and Canadian laws contribute to the social marginalization and high murder rates among prostitutes. It proposes that decriminalization is the only logical and humane legal response to Canadian prostitution.
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