Book reading on the topic of sex work
Equal Opportunities Officer: Author Dr Ursula Probst reads on 7 June, 6 pm, at Open Space, Brückenstraße 10
On Friday, 7 June at 6 pm, interested parties are invited to a reading to mark World Whore Day at Open Space, Brückenstraße 10. Dr Ursula Probst will be reading from her book "Precarious Freedom of Movement. Sex work in the context of mobile living environments of Eastern European migrants in Berlin". The event is being organised by the ChemNetz working group, consisting of staff from the sexual health advice centre of the City of Chemnitz's Office for Health and Prevention, the specialist advice centres Daria Dresden and KOBRAnet Leipzig and the City of Chemnitz's Equal Opportunities Officer, Pia Hamann.
Representatives of the media are also invited. Admission is from 5.30 pm.
In political and media debates about sex work and prostitution in Germany, there is a lot of discussion about "Eastern European prostitutes". But what do the everyday lives of people from so-called "Eastern European" countries who engage in sex work in Germany look like? Based on long-term ethnographic field research in Berlin, social and cultural anthropologist Ursula Probst aims to provide answers to this question in her book "Precarious Freedom of Movement". By examining the experiences of women and men from various countries in Eastern Europe, she shows that the precarious living conditions of sex-working migrants are an expression of the far-reaching marginalisation of "Eastern Europeans" in neoliberal Europe. However, these fundamental problems are obscured in sex work debates in favour of a stereotypical portrayal of "Eastern European prostitutes", which instead perpetuates a devaluation of "Eastern Europe".
Dr Ursula Probst is a social and cultural anthropologist and research associate at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. She works on issues relating to sexual economies, labour migration, health and the construction of "Eastern Europe" in Germany. In addition to her research on sex work in Berlin, she is currently working on the experiences of mobile systemically relevant workers with the pandemic-related regulations in Germany.