Faculty of Education - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/162

Filters

2003 1
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Type: PhD thesis × Subject: Victoria × Subject: Melbourne × Author: Lantz, Sarah ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Sex work and study: students, identities and work in the 21st century
    Lantz, Sarah ( 2003)
    In order to secure a well-paid position in the Australian labour force there has been increasing pressure on young people to extend their educational qualifications. As a result, the last decade has witnessed a 66% increase in the number of students attending Higher Education institutions (ABS, 2000:3). This rise in participation has however not been matched by an increase to public funding. Instead, the government has bound the education sector more closely to the economy, and to principles of economic rationalism and free market liberalism. Students (and their families) now bear the brunt of increased fees; a lowering of the income threshold for the repayment of HECS; and a significant decrease in government income support. In order to ease this burden, a number of studies have found that students are supplementing their low incomes through the informal economy and illegal sources of income (White, 1995; White, Amuir, Harris & McDonnell, 1997; Wilson & Lincoln, 1992, Williamson, 1996; MacDonald, 1998; Finnegan, 1998). This includes donating blood in return for lunch and bone marrow for cash (Steene, 1998:25); working in medical experiments (Cummins, 1998); cash-in-hand work; and illegal sources such as drug dealing, shoplifting, and organised stealing rings (White, Anuir, Harris & McDonnell, 1997:57). A number of studies have also found that students are working in the sex industry, ‘... to support themselves, their children and their own post-secondary studies' (Pyett, Haste, & Snow, 1995:3; Weiner, 1996; Perkins, 1991; Snow, 1999). This thesis explores the findings of a participatory action research project conducted into the lives of forty young women, all post-secondary education students, working in the Melbourne sex industry. Twenty of these students, are from Melbourne University, and have participated in a three-year longitudinal study spanning from 1999 to 2002. The other twenty participants all attend a range of higher education institutions in Melbourne. The research examines the factors influencing participants to enter the sex industry; how they are mediated by social, educational, economic, and environmental factors; and how they are responding, as agentic subjects, to this rapidly changing environment. By focusing on the ‘lived experiences’ of these young women, the research seeks to actively disrupt conventional thinking that shape our understanding of contemporary youth. It suggests that traditional frameworks that mark and measure youth 'success' are not particularly useful in discussing young people’s lives today. The notion of the ‘mainstream’ is, in particular, called into question. The paradox that emerges in this research is that participants engage in practices which seem to deviate from the 'mainstream' in order to, in effect, fit into the 'mainstream', It is also clear that a false distinction between the ‘mainstream’ and those ‘outside the mainstream’ creates an arbitrary division which glosses over the social and personal problems that all young people face in common. Similarly, the research calls into question traditional linear models of youth, where youth is viewed as a structured transition from dependence to independence, school to work and from adolescence to adulthood (defined in terms of marriage, family and lifetime career) similar to that of their parents generation (Wyn & Dwyer, 2001:87). Instead the research suggests that participants lives are characterised by mixed life patterns (Wyn and Dwyer, 2001), divergent biographies, contingent and pragmatic plans. These are young women who live their lives in terms of an ongoing production of self (Davies & Harre, 1990), marked by fragmented and multiple identities. This multidimensionality is constructed as participants’ inhabit numerous sites, take on different responsibilities and are involved in a range of different relationships. The taking up of multiple identities however, often results in tensions which surface in participants’ everyday lives. These tensions are explored in detail in this research. In practice, this has meant examining the discursive tension between human agency and social structure. Participants are understood to be constrained by the resources (material, symbolic and cultural) they have at their disposal, and determinants of social processes within their own lives (Short, 1992:181).