Biopolitics and Sex Work

Abstract

For more than a century the society, the women’s movement and the feminist organizations are crossed by a debate which is still latent and unresolved: the prostitution, is or is not a job? And in the case of being so, how should it be implemented, regulated and exercised? From this discussion, we analyze the film Elles from the director Malgorzata Szumowska. In this film, Anne, a journalist from the magazine Elle, should make interviews to students who choose the sex work as financial support. To do this, we try to make a crossover between the definitions of biopolitics and sex that offers Michel Foucault, linking it to the position that society and the state currently assumed to sex work. This film will allow us to uncover some tension and discourses that cross our societies combining religious, moral prejudices and hygienists have the sole effect of discrimination, stigmatization and persecution of those who exercise the sex trade.