membership in campaigns.

The transition in these countries will be painful,

long, and drawn out. The trade unions still bear the taint of the old regimes. And
serious state regulation of working conditions went out with the euphoria of the
new market economies.
In sum, Mogensen has helped our understanding of the signicance of
globalization of markets for the health and safety of workers. And he has raised
many important questions for us to pursue. This macro-perspective is a won-
derful antidote to the substance by substance hyper-epidemiological approach to
occupational health. But I wish some portion of the book had dealt with China,
India, and Southeast Asia, where much of the hazardous industry has gone and
where workers health is under siege in a battle that dwarfs other regions.
Charles Levenstein is a Professor Emeritus of Work Environment at the
University of Massachusetts-Lowell. His research focuses on the politics
and economics of occupational disease and injury; international dimensions of
workers health; integrated approaches to health protection and health
promotion; work environment justice; history and ethics of occupational health;
and sustainable development. Address correspondence: Dr. Charles Levenstein,
Department of Work Environment Kitson Hall, Room 200 (UML North), 1
University Avenue, Lowell, MA 01854, USA. Telephone: (+011) 978-934-3250.
Fax: (+011) 978-452-5711. E-mail: Chuck_lev@comcast.net.
Bernstein, Elizabeth. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 291 pp. $22.00 (paperback).
Why study sex workbecause to study the way prostitution is understood,
tolerated, or punished is to study the way a culture denes social justice. Public
policies toward such forms of labor are intimately interconnected with the
means with which the society aims to promote and or neglect questions about
equality (Hobson 1990). For many years now, discussion about sex work has
been characterized by a schism between sex negative conservatives and sex
positive liberal feminist camps. For many feminists, prostitution is best seen an
expression of patriarchal exploitation and oppression (MacKinnon 1987); on
the other hand, sex positive feminists see prostitution as a subversive expression
of freedom and economic empowerment, a workers issue (Alexander 1987;
Goldman 1917). While the former group sees sexuality as a core component of
gender inequity, the latter sees it in terms of liberatory possibility as well as a
means of making a living, of work (Bromberg 1999; Jenness 1990; Jolin 1994).
The former describe sex for money transactions using the word prostitution
connoting whore stigma, sexual shame, and unworthiness, while advocates
302 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY
such as Bernstein (1999) frame the practice as sex work suggesting both radical
sexual identity and the normalization of the profession in terms of service
provision and care giving and a burgeoning, global service economy,
(p. 187). The two positions have been rehashed repeatedly as if they were
mutually expressive terms. Yet as public space is appropriated at exponential
rates, their inuence on the current public polices cannot be underemphasized.
While virtual spaces for sexually related materials have only expanded with the
rise and social acceptance of a billion dollar internet market for commodied
sexual content, physical spaces where communities of difference converge, street
walkers work, and public sexual cultures thrive have been squeezed (Bernstein
2001; Ferrell 2001; Lee 2002; Worth 2002). Herein prostitution is used a device
to sanitize the public commons. [T]he common focus of state intervention has
been on eliminating visible manifestations of poverty and deviance (both racial
and national) from urban spaces, rather than the exchange of sex for money per
se, Elizabeth Bernstein claims in her new work Temporarily Yours: Intimacy,
Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (p. 164).
Elizabeth Bernstein is a Berkeley-trained sociologist who teaches sociology
and womens studies at Barnard. She spent much of the 1990s as a participant
observer conducting an ethnography on sex work in the streets of San Fran-
ciscos Tenderloin neighborhood. The result is Temporarily Yours. Writing about
the ways that urban space is increasingly viewed a private commodity, a part and
parcel of a growth machine utilized to cultivate a better business climate for
economic expansion, Bernstein locates her study within the shifting terrain of a
post-welfare neo-liberal city. Herein prostitutes and their patrons were targeted
as symbols of urban decay, to be swept from the streets. Prostitutes are among
the disorderlythey are among the disreputable or obstreperous or unpredict-
able people; panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers . . . loiterers, the
mentally disturbed, she quotes James Q. Wilson and George Kelling writing
about their theory of crime prevention Broken Windows policing. Thus, public
signs of sexual commerce were viewed as an eyesore. And politicians from San
Francisco to New York won election after election ghting, condemning, and
targeting sex work as a symbol of all that is wrong with urban life. While few
could identify secondary harmful effects of their presence, these manifestations
were targeted and largely wiped away from public view. Simultaneously, a global
marketplace for sexual commerce only increased, as online pornography and
escort services became a billion dollar market. And understandings of sexual
commerce shifted with the trends in a global market place. For Bernstein, the
differing contexts of sexual interaction and commerceinside or outside,
between man and boy, for procreation or romance, or even between males and
femaleshave differing social meanings that result in vastly divergent social and
theoretical understandings and policies. Differing denitions determine the
responses sexual labor. [N]ormative discussions of sexual labor should begin
with an understanding of the socially and historically specic meanings that afx
to commercial sexual transactions, and to intimacy and sexuality more gener-
ally, the author explains (p. 187).
303 BOOK REVIEWS
Increasingly, the practice is linked with issues including the regulation of
public space, policing, political economy, and global capital (Bland 1992; Cham-
bliss 1964; Gilfoyle 1992; Wagner 1997). [T]he San Francisco Bay Area, which,
by the late 1990s was one of the hearts of the new economy and thus emblem-
atic of its attendant economy of desire, Bernstein explains in the introduction of
the study (p. 16). Throughout these years in San Francisco, the social mores
regarding sexual work shifted from stigma toward social acceptance, at least for
many. Few would bat an eye if a young graduate stated he or she worked as a
stripper, go-go boy, or attendant at a sex club. Yet, public polices rarely mirrored
such progressive thinking. While the stigma around sex work receded from
public view, it was never far beneath the surface. Instead, public policies reected
many of these shifts from progressive to regressive thinking. While policy
makers hailed neoliberal economic models that supported open markets, they
condemned those catering to the most basic of desires, those attending to the
ever expanding supply demand curve (Shepard 2007). Bernstein seeks to make
sense of a service-based economy attending to market supplications, while shift-
ing stigma from producers, workers, to consumers of services, those who pur-
chase products and services related to sexual commerce. Some nights, Bernstein
works as a decoy on the strolls of the Tenderloin; others she rides with the police
as they target consumers, sending them to John school.
The study also contributes to a larger conversation about the meanings of
sexual commerce for a new cohort of urban actors taking place in a distinct urban
milieu. San Francisco, with its Matrix programs and John Schools, is both an
exceptional space and an incubator for new forms of social policies, possibilities
and controlsall taking place within the streets and computer networks of a
global city. Although the Bay-Area is neither a typical, nor a representative US
location, I maintain with other commentators that the fact that postindustrial
cultural transformations occurred in a manner that was more condensed, rapid,
and exaggerated here than elsewhere, the author explains (p. 16). Thus, more
than anything, understandings of prostitution have to do with the location in
which services are purchased, paid for, and rendered. Bernstein situates and
builds the study of sexual commerce within long-standing debates about the
relationship between money, culture, and self. The nature of money resembles
the nature of prostitution, the author quotes Georg Simmels 1907 essay on the
topic. The indifference with which it lends itself to any use, the indelity with
which it leaves everyone, its lack of ties to anyone, its complete objectication
that excludes any attachment and makes it suitable as a pure means, the author
quotes Simmel, suggesting a close analogy between capital and sexuality (p. 7).
The study of sexual labor is thus a study of political economy. By extension, it
involves the streets, cars, phone cables, and cultural mores San Franciscos
distinct neighborhoods as they grapple with the ows of social, cultural, and
transnational capital rapidly transforming a distinct urban space and those who
live, work, play, and survive in it.
The eldwork for Temporarily Yours took place during a series of points in
San Franciscos Tenderloin neighborhood in the mid-1990s, a space which at that
304 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY
point had managed to elude the trend to toward gentrication taking place in so
many of SanFranciscos other spaces withhipsocial andcultural capital. It was not
always easy to call the Tenderloin a trendy space. Years before speed became an
East Coast public healthissue, the drug fueledthe thriving undergroundeconomy
of the neighborhood, located just north of Market Street. HIV-AIDS, street
drugs, the homeless queer youth who dropped into the neighborhood frompoints
unknown only to vanish before the city had known they were there characterized
much of this tragicomic milieu. I worked and conducted research (Shepard 1997)
in the neighborhood from 19931995, during the same period in which the
research took place. Bernstein could not have chosen a richer space in which to
locate the ongoing debates about the shifting meanings of a purchase, demand,
and commerce of sex. It is not an understatement to suggest that the economy
of sex pulsed through these streets with an electric sense of contrasts between
possibility and desolation, high octane desire and bleak disappointment, pleasure
and violence, eros and anxiety, connection and separation, contact and isolation,
health and illness, and joy and annihilation.
Like muchof urbanlife, the answers toquestions about the meanings of sexual
commerce cannot be separated from the space in which they take place. It is
complicated. While there is a lure, gaze, and intrigue to questions sex for money
transactions, it is also work and therefore subject to shifting contours of a global
marketplace, in which the imperatives of transnational commerce often precede
human need. Bernsteins contribution to remind us much of the debate about sex
work has taken place as cities around the world have used its presence as a
justication to, criminalize economically and racially marginalized people who
occupy public streets (p. 187). Cities changed during the 1990s. Using one of the
most emblematic signs of urban space, Bernsteins study richly describes how.
Benjamin Shepard is Assistant Professor of Human Services at City Tech/ City
University of New York. He is the author/editor of ve books, White Nights and
Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell
1997), and FromACTUP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the
Era of Globalization (Verso 2002). The latter work was a non-ction nalist for the
Lambda Literary Awards in 2002. In addition, Queer Political Performance and
Protest and Play, Creativity, and the New Community Organizing are both under
contract with Routledge. In addition his work, Community Projects as Social
Activism: From Direct Action to Direct Services (Sage), is due at next year. Address
correspondence: Dr. Benjamin Shepard, Department of Human Services
(N-401), New York City College of Technology, The City University of New
York, 300 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201-1909, USA. Telephone: (+011) 718-
260-5135. Fax: (+011) 718-254-8530. E-mail: benshepard@mindspring.com.
References
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Bernstein, E., 1999. Whats wrong with prostitution? Whats right with sex work? Comparing markets in
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. 2001. The meaning of the purchase: Desire, demand, and the commerce of sex. Ethnography 2:389
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Bland, L. 1992. Purifying the public world: Feminist vigilantes in late Victorian England. Womens History
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normally quiet west village area. New York Times January 19.
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