Housing sex within the city : the placement of sex services beyond respectable domesticity?

The solicitation and provision of sexual services for material compensation is played out across the (sub)urban landscapes of our cities, with solicitation and provision for a single transaction often occurring in different locations (Prior et al. 2013). Provision of direct sex services, those involving direct physical contact between the client and sex worker, occur across a variety of public, quasi-public and private places, including streets, brothels, massage parlours and private homes (ibid.; Harcourt and Donovan 2005). While provision of indirect sexual stimulation may also occur in many of these places, it also occurs through sexual exchanges and performances via pay-to-view TV, the internet and phone sex lines (Prior et al. 2013; Hearne 2006). Geographical research emphasizes how sex services, which are viewed as falling outside of 'respectable domesticity'" that is, the social norms of heterosexual monogamous relationships and reproduction" have distinctive moral geographies within cities that are often characterized by socio-spatial exclusion, repression, marginalization, separation, and distancing from the spaces and landscapes associated with the sanctity of respectable domesticity (e.g. the home and the residential neighbourhood as its extension; Prior et al. 2012; Hubbard 2011). Recent legal geography research has highlighted how these moral geographies are reinforced and sometimes challenged through national, state and local laws, and diverse techniques such as planning, policing, education and licensing through which the laws are administered (Bartel et al. 2013; Hubbard 2011; Prior 2008). This chapter contributes to this moral and legal geography research and broader dialogues in socio-legal studies (Valverde 2010, 2005), through a study interrogating the distinctive legal geography that has emerged between sex services and respectable domesticity within the context of Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), since 1979. In particular, it focuses on the shifting rights to the city and conceptions of offensiveness on which it was founded.