Social Problems & Social Issues S.

2 total works

Making it Work

by Valerie Jenness

Published June 1993

As its double-edged title suggests, Making It Work examines the oldest profession as just that: a service industry with professional sex workers. This reframing of prostitution is done by chronicling the evolution of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), the leading organization of the contemporary prostitutes' rights movement. Founded in the early 1970s, a period of intense and far-reaching change in American sexual mores, COYOTE sought from the beginning to claim ownership of the problem of prostitution from the traditional experts. In its first campaign, California-based COYOTE engaged local law enforcement and municipal government officials in debate over selective and discriminatory enforcement of criminal law. In its next stage of development, COYOTE joined in the feminist debates on violence against women and the right of women to control their bodies, linking the question of prostitution to the larger issues of women's rights. In recent years, prostitutes' rights organizations have countered assertions that prostitutes are spreading AIDS and these organizations now constitute a link between prostitutes and public health agencies. The book adds an important practical and theoretical voice to the issues of prostitution, pornography, and sexuality within contemporary feminism. Furthermore, in reconstructing prostitution as a social problem, it speaks more broadly to the notion of deviance, and how so-called deviants can act to frame the debates that affect their lives.

HATE CRIMES

by Valerie Jenness

Published 14 October 1997

Violence directed at victimized groups because of their real or imagined characteristics is as old as humankind. Why, then, have -hate crimes- only recently become recog-nized as a serious social problem, especially in the United States? This book addresses a timely set of questions about the politics and dynamics of intergroup violence manifested as discrimination. It explores such issues as why injuries against some groups of people--Jews, people of color, gays and lesbians, and, on occasion, women and those with dis-abilities--have increasingly captured notice, while similar acts of bias-motivated violence continue to go unnoticed.

The authors offer empirically grounded, theoretically in-formed answers to the question: How is social change on this order possible? Their analysis of the dynamics draws upon three established traditions: the social constructionist approach; new social movements theory; and the new institutionalist approach to understanding change as a process of innovation and diffusion of cultural forms. In this case, new social movements have converged of late to sustain public discussions that put into question issues of -rights- and -harm- as they relate to a variety of minority constituencies.

The authors couple their general discussion with close attention to many particular anti-violence projects. They thereby develop a compelling theoretical argument about the social processes through which new social problems emerge, social policy is developed and diffused, and new cultural forms are institutionalized.