title: Escorts’ narratives about negative commercial sex encounters and sexual harassment
title: A critical discourse study
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Nikolova, Evelin
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024
Subjects: discourse analysis
critical discourse analysis
sexual harassment
sex work
escorts
small story approach
the Discourse Historical Approach
positioning analysis
digitally mediated communication
forum

description: This thesis explores the ways an online community of self-identified sex
 workers represent negative commercial sex encounters and sexual
 harassment. The dataset comprises threads totalling 70,000 words from the
 ‘Warnings &amp; Wasters’ board of the Support and Advice for Escorts
 Forum. To study the narratives of escorts, I adopt a critical discourse
 studies lens and I combine the discourse historical approach and the
 narrative practice approach, which to the best of my knowledge, have not
 been previously used together in linguistic research. This novel
 combination offers a comprehensive lens for analysing individual stories
 shared in digital contexts. I use positioning analysis and affective
 positioning to explore how escorts position clients, themselves, and event
 sequence in the world of the story (taleworld) at Positioning Level 1,
 themselves vis-à-vis other members of the forum in the here-and-now
 (storyrealm) at Positioning Level 2, and themselves in relation to broader
 societal discourses (i.e., regarding sex work) beyond the current
 storytelling situation (above-and-beyond) at Positioning Level 3. In so
 doing, this thesis enriches our understanding of how sex workers use
 language to talk about workplace abuse, therefore making a significant
 contribution to the field of sociolinguistics, which has largely neglected
 the language of sex workers. Findings suggest that escorts’ narratives in
 the ‘Warnings &amp; Wasters’ board primarily revolve around the
 breaking of agreements/pushing of boundaries, time- wasting, economic
 damage, verbal abuse, violation of privacy and dignity, and clients’
 health and substance abuse issues. These narratives often vary in
 structure and content, depending on the type of violation. The analysis of
 escorts’ narratives showed that at Positioning Level 1 clients are
 portrayed negatively in terms of their role in the storyworld (e.g., as a
 boundary pusher, stalker/harasser) and escorts as victims and/or
 professionals who in most instances actively try to maintain their
 boundaries. These representations are achieved mainly relationally i.e.,
 the ways characters are portrayed is construed through their interaction
 with each other via a range of discourse features and positioning cues. At
 Positioning Level 2, tellers positioned themselves as supportive
 colleagues vis-à-vis fellow escorts. Apart from the act of posting a
 warning, which in itself implies this, tellers also made this explicit by
 directly asking others to protect themselves (e.g., through imperatives
 such as ‘I highly recommend to avoid’, ‘Be careful ladies’). A key finding
 of the analysis is that tellers positioned themselves as responsible for
 instances of economic damage, but they did not do so in relation to sexual
 violence, therefore challenging societal myths about sex work and consent.
 At Positioning Level 3, escorts also positioned themselves as individuals
 who are negatively affected by the stigmatisation and marginalisation of
 sex work/ers. This was predominantly materialised in affective
 positionings of fear (i.e., fear of reporting, fear of being outed, fear
 of asserting boundaries) or distress and frustration with clients’
 disrespect. With regards to sexual harassment, findings suggest that
 escorts’ understanding of the phenomenon is confined to unwanted
 repetitive contact. Nevertheless, this thesis uncovers previously
 unrecognized forms of sexual harassment unique to the context of sex work,
 expanding the current understanding of this phenomenon. It also reveals
 how typical patterns of sexual harassment, commonly acknowledged in other
 work environments, manifest differently in the realm of sex work. Finally,
 findings underscore the influence of the stigmatization and legal
 constraints of sex work in the UK which foster a power imbalance and
 contribute to a cycle of underreported workplace abuse, exacerbating the
 marginalization and vulnerability of sex workers.