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Ana Rojas Martín
Arbeit-, Arbeiter_innen & Plätze in MMG
Freie Universität
Sommersemester 2019
29. 07. 2019
Biopolitics of Sex Work:
The instrumentalization of political power over
women in Egypt (1830-1958)
Women’s March in Cairo, “Military are Liars! Stop Violence. Down with the Military
Regime!”. Photo by journalist Sarah Carr. December 2011.
1
1. Introduction. Object, relevance and method of the work.
Sex work has always been a subject of public discussion, although the voices of sex workers
are not used to be incorporated. Generally, hegemonic moral and dogmatic paternalism have
been prioritized over the conditions in which they work -or have been forced to work- and, in
any case, their voices have been historically silenced and repressed.
The term “Sex work” came into more common use with the publication of Sex Work:
Writings by Women in the Industry by Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander in 1987.
Since then, it has been adopted by health agencies and advocacy organizations around the
world, and its use is increasingly used by the mainstream media. According to the famous
American sexual rights activist Carol Leigh, the usage of the term “sex work” marks the
beginning of a movement: “It acknowledges the work we do rather than defines us by our
status.” 1 The combative and inclusive recategorization of the term sex work is why I have
chosen to elaborate this analysis focusing on this term that in mainly prostitution, because it
humanizes the labor organization and dignity of sex workers, that have chosen to be treated
and called as such. Prostitution has always constituted an objectivation of sex workers and an
implicitly stigmatization of them, mainly accompanied by a huge misogyny.
In the case of Egypt, sex work has been practiced since the Ancient period and as time has
passed, it has been legalized, subsequently regularized and finally abolished, and so it
continues in the present. Furthermore, the socialization of sex work in Egypt from the 19th
and 20th centuries has evidenced the power that patriarchal culture, together with colonial
and nationalist governments, had over women’s bodies and how it could be instrumentalized
in the political realm. Thus, the object of this work consist of analyzing the political
implication of sex work in the colonial Egypt and subsequently after the 1952 Revolution, to
get to know with what finality does the state exercises its power over the life and sexuality of
women.
In this sense, I will try to expose my main thesis: the instrumentalization of political power
over women’s lives through the strategic regulation of sex work. The relevance of this work
lies in exploring a specific type of bio-political project, that is the regulation of sex work in
1 Carol Leigh coins the term “Sex Work”. Nswp: Global Network of Sex Work Projects. Promoting Health and
Human Rights. 1 January 2019. https://www.nswp.org/timeline/event/carol-leigh-coins-the-term-sex-work
2
colonial Egypt and its trajectory to abolitionism, to see what it says about the emergence of a
national autonomous political community.
The method that I am following here is first, the elaboration of a theoretical framework that
can serve as a frame of reference for this analysis, focused primarily on the sociological
conceptualization of sex work. Second, I will introduce the analytical approach that will
allow me to argue my thesis throughout this document, that is, the idea of biopolitics of the
theoretician Michael Foucault. Finally, I will contextualize the political instrumentalization of
biopower over sex workers in colonial times during the French and British rule, and how it
was posteriorly reconfigured by the Nasserist regime to configure a social cohesive
nationalist project in Egypt.
2. Theoretical framework.
With the object of carrying out an analysis of the political implications of sex work in Egypt,
it is pertinent to sketch in this section a theoretical framework that embodies the main
concepts that I will use in this document.2 Here, I will focus in the two main elements of this
work: the concept of sex work and its biopolitical dimension of its regulation and final
abolition in Egypt.
2.1. Ontology and sociology of sex work. Why does sex work work?
In this section, I will expose the ontological dimensions of sex work, in order to understand
its nature of being, its existence and reality and to determine its fundamental categories.
First, sex work is defined by the World Health Organization as “the provision of sexual
services for money or goods” and sex worker is the designation given to women, men and
transgendered people “who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services, and who
consciously define those activities as income generating even if they do not consider sex
work as their occupation”. In the big picture, sex industry is the “combined phenomenon of
individuals, establishments, customs and messages - explicit and implicit, desired and
undesired - involved in commercial sex.” 3 Beyond normative definitions, it is pertinent to
2 Rivera García, Patricia .1998. Marco teórico, elemento fundamental en el proceso de investigación científica.
Revista: Tip: Tópicos de investigación y posgrado. México, pp. 3-4.
3 Cheryl Overs. Sex Workers: Part of the solution. An analysis of HIV prevention programming to prevent HIV
transmission during commercial sex in developing countries. World Health Organization, 2002. p. 2.
3
place sex work in a system that allows and perpetuates its functionality. Why does sex work
exist and why is it predominantly composed of women? Why does sex work work?
Precisely, I argue here that the fundamental category that underpins the existence of sex work
is its functionality, and that it must be analyzed as a social phenomenon in the context of the
intersection of three different systems: the patriarchy, capitalism and the racial system.
Critical theories of society have tried to explain the close relationship between sex work and
power structures: 4
First, feminism analyzes sex work as a result of the sexualization and the objectification of
women's bodies in a system ruled by patriarchal control. In this sense, sex work has not only
a negative effect over adult women and young girls that are into it, but over all women as
whole collective. Sex work confirms and consolidates patriarchal definitions of women,
putting them at the service of the predominantly male consumption and under the spotlight of
a society that stigmatizes them.5 Furthermore, the objectified representation of female sex
workers in the media and in another sectors of sex industry, such as pornography, contribute
to the socialization of gendered social norms, and distort the concept of sexual consent,
contributing to the normalization of rape culture and strengthening the ideology of misogyny.
Second, the term work in sex work is linked to the capitalization of women’s sexuality and
the treatment of the female body as an economic commodity. Women's bodies have become
the goods on which a global industry has been built. Thus sex work must be explained in the
framework of political economy, because its industrialization and trade has created a
multibillion-dollar global market, involving millions of women, that makes a substantial
contribution to national and global economies.6 Capitalism has gradually changed the image
of sex work and has laid the foundations for a new form of economic slavery, because as I
will expose in the following chapters, most of female sex workers in Egypt are poor women
without economic or social resources, with a status of social exclusion and who see in sex
work a form of maintenance for them and their family forced to participate in sex industry.
4 Cobo Bedia, Rosa. Un ensayo sociológico sobre la prostitución. Informe de Política y Sociedad
Vol. 53, Núm. 3. Universidad de La Coruña. España, 2016. p. 898
5 Hofman, Cecilia. Sexo: De la intimidad al “trabajo sexual”, o ¿es la prostitución un derecho humano?
Coalición contra el tráfico de mujeres – Asia Pacífico. Manila, 1997. p. 2.
6 Jeffreys, S. The industrial vagina. The political economy of the global sex trade. Routledge, London. 2012. p.
3.
4
For this reason, it is pertinent to raise the question of whether sex work is a job that a woman
chooses like she chooses to be bus driver, teacher or economist -as some feminist and
neoliberal currents of thought have argued-, or it is a systematic source of exploitation based
on her own sexualization to which she is forced to participate to guarantee her subsistence.
Finally, and regarding to the racial dimension of sex work, its consumers -especially those
located in Western countries- demand insistently the sexual services of racialized women.
This systematic patron of behavior represents what is called a mechanism of sexual
colonialism. 7 This sex colonialism is observed both in Western countries, where the most of
female sex workers come from Africa, Latin America or Asia, and in the so-called “sex
tourism” of the plaintiffs, directed mainly to postcolonial and poor countries. 8 It existed, so to
say, a fetishization within sex work, of those women relegated to inferior positions because of
their racial and / or ethnic identity.
As it has been noted, these three sociological dimensions evidence the main ontological
element that sustain sex work: violence. Precisely, violence is the inherent factor in the
intersections of gender, race and class that place sex work at the service of dominant
structures. Violence allows the subordination of women to the systematic exploitation of their
bodies and their sexuality. According to the sociologist Richard Poulin, sex workers are
susceptible to any type of violence (physical, psychical, social, and economic) and he affirms
that 80-90% of sex workers in a global scale suffer it. 9 In a nutshell, the violence exercised
by the dominant power of patriarchal, colonialist and capitalist system is what sustains,
perpetuates and, ultimately, makes sex work work.
2.2. Biopolitics of power.
In this point, I will introduce the concept of biopolitics of Michel Foucault, which I will use
later to analyze the treatment of sex work in Egypt. For Foucault, social control over
individuals was not only affected through the imposition of consciousness or ideology, but
also through the control of human bodies. In this sense, the body is a biopolitical entity and
medicine would be the main example of a biopolitical strategy. 10
7 Cobo Bedia, Rosa. Un ensayo sociológico sobre la prostitución. Informe de Política y Sociedad
Vol. 53, Núm. 3. Universidad de La Coruña. España, 2016. p. 899.
8 Foundation Scelles. Sexual Exploitation. Prostitution and Organized Crime, Paris, Economics. 2012. p.15.
9 Richard Poulin. Prostitution. La mondialisation incarnée, Syllepse, Paris. 2005. p. 27.
5
In short, the concept biopolitics refers to the articulation of political power over life. Foucault
argues that this power was developed from the 17th century in two main ways: one, and first
to be formed is designated by the author as the anatomo-politics of the human body, focused
in the body as a machine: its education, the increase of its aptitudes, its usefulness and
docility and its integration into systems of effective and economic control. The other stage of
development of biopower took place in the 18th century and it was centered on the body-
species, the mechanics of the living and that supports biological processes, such as births and
mortality, the level of health, the duration of life and longevity, with all the conditions that
can cause them to vary. All these problems are taken by a series of interventions and
regulatory controls: biopolitics of the population.11
Following this line of thought, I will focus in this work in the role of biopolitics over life in
the context of the Egyptian state interventions and its regulatory controls over the lives and
bodies of women in what is historically called the medicalization of prostitution.12 This kind
of productive power encourages particular forms of life and stigmatizes others at the same
time.13 In this sense, I argue that the social stigmatization of sex workers in Egypt embodies a
multidimensional structure where several oppressions collide. As I have expose in the section
2.1; sex work is consequently configured by a system of violence based on gender inequality,
economic oppression and racial discrimination, but it is also instrumentalized in benefit of
political interests. As I will explain in the next chapters the control over women’s life and
women’s bodies took special political relevance in the context of the Egyptian Revolution of
1952.
3. Sex work in Egypt in the 19 th-
20 th
centuries: A national problem.
According to the feminist Egyptian writer, Nawal El Saadawi, sex work is generally linked to
the birth of patriarchal society, which has historically relegated women to an inferior position
10 Foucault, Michel. El nacimiento de la medicina social, Revista centroamericana de Ciencias de la Salud.
Dits et Écrits, II, 1977. p. 210.
11 Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. pp.168-169.
12 Biancani, Francesca. “Let Down the Curtains Around Us” Sex Work in Colonial Cairo, 1882-1952.
Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the Degree of Doctor
in Philosophy, London, 2012. p. 170.
13 Saleh, Layla. (Muslim) Woman in Need of Empowerment, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18:1,
2016. p. 83.
6
and progressively deprived them of their equal status with men. In the past, sex workers in
Egypt were women who had sexual relations with men to whom they we not married in
return for a monetary payment. They were often highly respected and even considered sacred,
since the first institutions where the act of prostitution flourished were the temples of the
gods. The main example is the temple of Amun in the times of ancient Egypt, where families
chose their daughters and offered them to the priest of the temple of this god, who indulged in
sexual relations with many women under religious rituals. When the girls grew up, they could
live the temple and receive an important social respect and recognition, what could allow
them to marry into noble families. Furthermore, after the Arab invasion, in Egypt what was
recognized as holy prostitution continued to exist during Greek, Roman and Ptolemaic eras,
and it represented an important source of income for religious temples. 14
However, the increasing practice of sex work across time has collided with the moral
restrictive images of women’s life, and sexuality. Sex work, in this context, was considered to
be an immoral risk for virtuous women that could end up falling into sin. In the nineteenth
century, socio economic upheavals affected the lives of sex workers, who were seen as “non-
respectable” women that their personal misfortunes and nationwide transformations had
deprived them of any other means of survival. However, and under French colonial regime
sex work was regulated and taxed in the beginning of 19th century, and women that performed
it most prominently were widows, divorcees, and immigrants.15. This means that sex work
was not only linked to the precarious economic conditions of women but also to their social
status, determined by a male figure: if they broke social ties with men, they were uprooted
and found in sex work a vital option that only led to their own exploitation and social
stigmatization.
With the French colonial settlement, it was officially initiated a labor migration between
Europe and Egypt, and regional markets transformed economic relations between women and
men, European and Arabs. In the Arab Mediterranean, this new migratory regime was
14 Nawal El Saadawi: Prostitution in Egypt. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
International Meeting of Experts (Cat. VI) on the social and cultural causes of prostitution and strategies against
procuring and sexual exploitation of women. 1985, p. 2-4.
15 Kozma, Liat. Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2011. p. 52.
7
significant to the administration of sex work. Moreover, what is most relevant here is that the
military conscription in Egypt restructured local communities and disturbed family life: the
recruitment demand for conscripts deprived the family incomes in Egypt and pushed women
into prostitution. Separated from their wives, men frequented brothels, and the spread of
venereal diseases increased. Four years after the beginning of systematic conscription, it was
known that syphilis and gonorrhea were on the rise and that medical experts must deal with a
great epidemy.
As expected, what really concerned the French authorities was not really the savage
exploitation or the lamentable health conditions of sex workers, but the fact that those
diseases required the removal of a considerable number of soldiers from active service. The
Egyptian Army’s chief physician, Antoine Barthelemy Clot-Bey, wrote a treatise on to
instruct regimental doctors how to carry out an examination for venereal disease and how to
treat it. He considered that dangerous sexuality was a main characteristic of the Egyptian
society and he absolutely considered sex workers responsible for the spread of venereal
diseases: “State authorities should monitor prostitutes”, he considered “to establish a first
line of defense against the disease”. 16
This was not so far: once France intervened sex work, Muhammad Ali Pasha’s May 1834
decree banned prostitutes and public dancers from Cairo. In this case, the Dr. Melissa Hope
Ditmore, researcher about the gender implications and conditions of sex work, affirms that
this ban was not so much a stain on public morality, but a consequence that prostitutes and
the taverns were considered a menace to military discipline and soldiers’ health. Although
the Egyptian Army took actions regarding Clot-Bey’s ideal of nationwide control, this control
was not really effective. Even sex workers had been prohibited from practicing their trade
around the military camps and in big cities, but outside Cairo prostitutes and ghawazi
(dancers) had moved on to Upper Egypt.
The British protectorate in the beginning of the 20th century brought the emergence of
modern prostitution in the city, which was characterized by the professionalization and
commercialization of sex work, through the regulatory mechanism of selected state-licensed
brothels. Regarding the venereal diseases epidemy, British authorities decided to establish
16 Hope, Ditmore. Melissa. The encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Greenwood press, London. Vol 1.
p. 44.
8
systems of health inspections, which required the professional description, registration, and
medical inspection of female workers.
After the Revolution of July in 1956, the nationalist government of Nasser claimed that the
regulations in the legislation of sex work must protect national public health. This leads what
is known as the medicalization of prostitution in Egypt, and it evidences the biopolitical
power exercised over female sex workers in the country.
4. Biopolitics of power: Sex work and nationalism in Egypt.
Back to Foucault’s theory, state interventions over female sexuality can be conceived as a
disciplinary technique of power based on the control, monitoring and supervision of women’s
bodies. 17 In this context, sex workers were individually confined and medicalized with the
final object of controlling the biological effects that affected the entire population, in this
case, the threat to public health that represented the spread of venereal diseases in the
country.
After the Revolution of July, local elites and rising middle class claimed an establishment of a
healthy Egyptian political community and sex work was seen as a major danger for the
maintenance of social and political order. According to the historian Francesca Biancani,
specialized in the historiography of sex work in Egypt, “the public discourse on commercial
sex, sexuality, gendered roles, marriage, family and public health in formally newly
independent Egypt were inseparable from the attempts at defining its modernity and political
maturity and legitimized local nationalists’ hegemonic role.”
A number of themes came together in the post-revolutionary public opinion: the fear of social
instability, the growing discomfort with increased female mobility and its irruption in the
public sphere and the spread of venereal contagion. In the context of the Egyptian nation-
making, these topics brought the general preoccupation about the degeneration of the national
community due to its crescent immorality, because local notions of citizenship and cultural
authenticity were mainly defined by religion. 18 In this situation, the Egyptian government
17 Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. p.140.
18 Biancani, Francesca. “Let Down the Curtains Around Us” Sex Work in Colonial Cairo, 1882-1952.
Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the Degree of Doctor
9
decided to take measures over sex work and female sex workers’ lives, in the sense that
regulation and the strict supervision of their medical conditions were seen as the main
strategies to prevent the spread of diseases. In the following table, it can be appreciated the
cipher of infected sex workers by gonorrhea in Egypt 3 years before the Revolution of 1952.
Table 1. Sex workers infected by gonorrhea (1946-1955).19
Modern Egyptian medicine delimited women’s experiences: women were categorized,
restricted and domesticated through the medical functions of defining, diagnosing and
treating by male doctors that had the legitimate authority over women bodies, and ultimately,
over their lives. 20 According to the Dr. Hibba Abugideiri, membership in Egypt’s modern
nationalist project required that each Egyptian must adopt this new social organization in
order to be included. Furthermore, the medicalization of prostitution was articulated by a
state apparatus whose policies reflected its patriarchal ideology: “Nationalism in Egypt
established a fundamental premise of modern society that modern medicine simply proved
natural namely, gender difference” (Abugideiri, 2010. p. 248).
in Philosophy, London, 2012. p. 40-47.
19 Willcox, R.R. Prostitution and venereal disease. Social considerations of prostitution. St. Mary’s Hospital,
London, and King Edward VII Hospital, Windsor. Brit. J. prev. soc. Med. (1961), 15, p.43
20 Abugideiri, Hibba. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt (Farnham, Surrey,
England: Ashgate, 2010). p.248
10
However, the modifications over the regulatory model on sex work, -originally based in the
British regulatory model and Law 68/1951 of the Wafd government- were highly ineffective
and negatively influenced by its complex-mixed judicial system.
This model condemned acts of prostitution out of state-licensed brothels, acts that could
incite others to participate in sex work and international sex trafficking. These legal
provisions did not really enforce penalties for sex work after the Law 76 -that sanctioned
non-licensed brothels and locals dedicated to sex work- but were directed against acts which
affected social moral behavior. 21 During this period, sex workers were employed in state-
licensed locals, but they used to evade institutionalized sex work, while mainly foreign
residents of brothers were not really controlled by sanitary regulations.
Aiming at supervising and reducing the spread of diseases, regulationism only really affected
native prostitutes in licensed brothels; if European workers were diagnosed with any disease
following medical inspections, they were not detained but rather expected to report their
consuls.22 Here we can see how it does not only existed a biopower strategically
instrumentalized over women’s bodies and ultimately, originated in a patriarchal gender
ideology, but it also existed a racist cataloguing of sex workers that determined and gave
shape to these biopolitical processes.
Although the main attempts of modifying Law 68 with minor changes, the Nasserist
government finally decided to establish a new legal framework on sex work: Law 10 on
Combating Prostitution, promulgated in 1961. Due to the ineffectiveness of the new strict
regulatory model, and under the argument that prostitution was considered to be a “blatant
feature of colonial oppression”, this new law established the final abolition of sex work.
These regulations were extended to Syria, recently united with Egypt in the United Arab
Republic in 1958. The judicial convictions could variate, in case of exercise, incitement or
advertising of sex work, from one year and not more than five years of prison and a fine
between 100 and 500 LE in the Egyptian administration and between 1000 and 5000 Lira in
the Syrian administration (articles 1 and 14).
21 Nawal El Saadawi: Prostitution in Egypt. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
International Meeting of Experts (Cat. VI) on the social and cultural causes of prostitution and strategies against
procuring and sexual exploitation of women. 1985, p. 4-6.
22 Biancani, Francesca. “Let Down the Curtains Around Us” Sex Work in Colonial Cairo, 1882-1952.
Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the Degree of Doctor
in Philosophy, London, 2012. p. 181.
11
The final imposition of the abolitionist model in the United Arab Republic represented the
final establishment of political power over sex workers, ultimately focused in the originally
modernist project of Egyptian nationalist elites. Although the existing concerns about the
health crisis of venereal diseases and the state's invasive interventions on women’s sexuality,
none of the measures of Law 10 was oriented to improve the sanitary conditions of sex
workers and much less to their social reintegration, neither during the colonial period nor
after the official start of the nationalist project in 1952. Despite the change in government, the
political concerns regarding sex workers remained the same: how they could be relocated -
rather, hidden - in the public sphere in order to fit within the project of postcolonial moral
regeneration of the Nasserist regime.23
5. Conclusion.
In this last section I will sketch some conclusive thoughts regarding the investigation carried
out in this document. First, my main objective was to proportionate a critical vision of sex
work through an intersectional perspective that contemplates the identity dimensions of
gender, race and class.
Without a critical identity analysis, the conceptualization of sex work will be left to a
reductionist significance of the term that does not link its existence to the strategic
articulation of the present hegemonic power structure. Examples of this would be as the
neoliberal conceptions of sex work in the legalist models of regulationism.
The main point I want to do here is that, it is precisely the capitalization of female sexuality
in a patriarchal system what contributed to the commodification of women’s bodies and has
ultimately, turn sex work into a work that can be regulated and finally incorporated into the
rule of law of certain countries such as Holland or Germany. No because of this I will say that
prohibitionist models (in some occasions, inadequately called “abolitionists”, as in the case of
Egypt) oriented to the criminalization of sex workers put them in better life conditions,
because their routine sexual exploitation joins to the systematic persecution of the state.
In the case of Egypt, Law 10 on Combatting Prostitution, mainly destined to abolish sex work
in the country is really, under my perspective, a prohibitionist model that rather ending sex
23 Biancani, Francesca: Sex Work in Colonial Egypt. Women, Modernity and The Global Economy. L.B.
Taurus. 2018, p. 210.
12
work, aims to displace it from public space in order to stabilize public opinion, both in the
colonial period and in the effective nationalist government after the 1952 revolution. For the
institutional feminist theory, an abolitionist model contemplates the dimensions of
exploitation and patriarchal domination of sex work and takes measures beyond the simple
prohibition of the activity, in order to penalize procurers and consumers of sex work and offer
sex workers protection and social reintegration measures. 24
State interventions following the epidemic of venereal diseases evidenced the existence of
instrumentalized political power in order to control and monitor the bodies of women. It
should be noted that the protocol of such medical controls was built on a misogynistic
dynamic of blaming and criminalizing female sex workers since the times of the French rule
of Clot Bey, passing through the British protectorate and continued to exist in the nationalist
period from 1952. With this, it is clear that the biopolitical measures carried out on sex
workers embodied sociological dimensions equally supported in a patriarchal, capitalist and
racist system, since native workers were the main victims of criminalization. Following this
line of thinking, biopolitical strategies carried out were ultimately legitimized by a moral
ideology contained in the Islamic religion, which collided with the presence of sex work in
the public space.
In this way, I will finish this work by affirming the existence of biopolitical power
technologies monitored by the state that can be strategically instrumentalized for the benefit
of the state, and ultimately legitimated with respect to its system of cultural values. Hence it
is important to remark and recognize the political relevance of the images of women’s lives
and especially, their sexuality, in the public sphere and how it can be politically intervened
and used in order to achieve political objectives.
6. Bibliography.
▪Abugideiri, Hibba. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt.
Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010.
▪Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics. Berkeley:
University of California, 2006.
24 Santoyo Salgado, Sofía. Modelos de Regulación de la Prostitución en la Unión Europea. Universidad de las
Islas Baleares. 2016. p.12.
13
▪Biancani, Francesca. “Let Down the Curtains Around Us” Sex Work in Colonial
Cairo, 1882-1952. Department of Government of the London School of Economics
and Political Science for the Degree of Doctor in Philosophy, London, 2012.
▪Biancani, Francesca: Sex Work in Colonial Egypt. Women, Modernity and The Global
Economy. L.B. Taurus. 2018
▪Carol Leigh coins the term “Sex Work”. Nswp: Global Network of Sex Work Projects.
Promoting Health and Human Rights. 1 January 2019.
▪Cobo Bedia, Rosa. Un ensayo sociológico sobre la prostitución. Informe de Política y
Sociedad. Vol. 53, Núm. 3. Universidad de La Coruña. España, 2016.
▪E. Tucker, Judith. Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Cambridge, Cambridgeshire:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
▪Foundation Scelles. Sexual Exploitation. Prostitution and Organized Crime, Paris,
Economics. 2012.
▪Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books,
1978.
▪Foucault, Michel. El nacimiento de la medicina social, Revista centroamericana de
Ciencias de la Salud. Dits et Écrits, II, 1977.
▪Hope, Ditmore. Melissa. The encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Greenwood
press, London. Vol 1.
▪Jeffreys, S. The industrial vagina. The political economy of the global sex trade.
Routledge, London. 2012.
▪Kozma, Liat. Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011.
▪Law No. 10/1961. Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights:
https://eipr.org/en/content/law-no-101961
▪Poulin, Richard. Prostitution. La mondialisation incarnée, Syllepse, Paris. 2005.
▪ Reanda, Laura. Prostitution as a Human Rights Question: Problems and Prospects of
United Nations Action. 1991.
▪Rivera García, Patricia. Marco teórico, elemento fundamental en el proceso de
investigación científica. Revista: Tip: Tópicos de investigación y posgrado. México,
1998.
▪Saleh, Layla. (Muslim) Woman in Need of Empowerment, International Feminist
Journal of Politics, 18:1, 2016.
14
▪Santoyo Salgado, Sofía. Modelos de Regulación de la Prostitución en la Unión
Europea. Universidad de las Islas Baleares. 2016
▪Willcox, R.R. Prostitution and venereal disease. Social considerations of prostitution.
St. Mary’s Hospital, London, and King Edward VII Hospital, Windsor. Brit. J. prev.
soc. Med. 1961
▪Yilmaz, Secil, "Love in the Time of Syphilis: Medicine and Sex in the Ottoman
Empire, 1860-1922". 2016.
15