The Prostitute and the PhD: Navigating Academic Spaces as a Tainted Researcher

Drawing on theories of sex work, marginalisation, feminism, and otherness, this chapter critically interrogates the complexities of navigating academic spaces as a woman who is known as a prostitute and a PhD candidate. Women sex-working academics act as feminist scholar trail blazers reversing years of self-erasure through public declarations of whoredom by demanding and taking ownership of academic spaces in direct opposition to narratives of sex workers as intellectually inferior, hyper-sexualised, and deviant. Drawing upon personal experiences of whore stigma within the academy, auto-ethnography as a feminist research methodology, and a refusal to renounce whore status, this chapter explores the complexities of the tainted and fetishised researcher, the interplay between whore and academic raising uncomfortable questions about violence experienced by sex-working researchers trying to navigate the complex intersecting terrains academia and prostitution.