A linguistic ethnographic approach to identity construction in in sex workers' narratives in England and Greece

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Most sex workers' needs remain unmet as violence, hate crimes, discrimination and social exclusionare among the problems they still face globally (Global Network of Sex Work Projects [NSWP], 2017).The majority of relevant legal frameworks, if not criminalising sex workers and the offer of paid sexualservices, criminalise either the involvement of third-parties or clients. Among others, these policiesgreatly draw on what could be broadly described as a debate between anti-sex-work and pro-sex-workscholars, where the former view sex work as a harmful cultural practice constituting a form of violence(Jeffreys, 2008) while the latter, eschewing traditional, moral understandings of sexuality, view it as alegitimate work. In England, while "policing and enforcement of prostitution is unevenly prioritised andresourced throughout the country", the sale/purchase of sexual services between consenting adults islegal but various prostitution related activities (e.g. soliciting) are illegal (All-Party Parliamentary Groupon Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade [APPG], 2014). Similarly, in Greece, sex work is regulated bylaws that no longer address the needs of the era and stigmatise sex workers (International Committeeon the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe [ICRSE], 2017), rendering it another interesting site for thestudy of sex work.To date, only a few studies have focused on sex workers' identity construction (Benoit et al., 2018;Chowdhury, 2006; Oliveira, 2017; Read, 2013), largely disregarding the mutually constitutiverelationship between language and society (Fairclough, 2013). Given that social identities areextensively (re)produced in language in its contextual use and its interactions with other semiotic modes (e.g. paralanguage, embodiment) (Koller, 2012), an in-depth analysis of discourse produced bysex workers can not only deconstruct stereotypes about them but also reveal a great deal about theiridentities and how such identities emerge, function and are embedded in interaction. Such anexploration can also offer an alternative to the more prevalent, sociological, psychological and clinicalapproaches to sex work, which focus predominantly on the factors driving entrance to sex work, itsrelationship with health and the levels of exclusion (Balfour & Allen, 2014).In view of the above, my aim in my thesis is to contribute to the linguistic and social scientificknowledge on sex workers' identity by following a linguistic ethnographic approach to examine how sexwork is discursively represented and understood in sex workers' own accounts. My PhD aims to address the following research question and sub-questions:How do sex workers in England and Greece talk about sex work and how do they present themselvesin relation to it?a) How do sex workers' gender and sexual identity affect their way of representing sex work?b) How and to what extent are sex workers' attitudes towards their job affected by clientèle andworksite?c) How do sex workers in England and in Greece talk about the legal frameworks regulating sex work intheir country?d) What aspects of the legal frameworks concerning sex work in Greece and in England are mentionedin sex workers' narratives and how are they described, evaluated and made sense of