Staging Decriminalisation: Sex Worker Performance and HIV

Sex workers around the world are producing cultural outputs for sex worker audiences and others. This essay explores examples of contemporary sex worker theatre, protest, installation, performance art and more. Sex worker artists challenge stigma, pathologisation and racist anti-immigration trafficking policy, ultimately pushing for the decriminalisation of sex work. Performance has played a role in how sex workers have responded to HIV both politically and culturally in this century.