The performativity of prostitution spaces – female sex-workers and the public space of Hungary

Abstract

The increased inflow of Roma Hungarian sex workers has significantly shaped Zurich’s inner-city red-light district in the last years. Over half a decade ago, Hungarian sex workers were a tiny minority in Zurich; now, they represent the absolute majority. Their increase was reason enough for the city government to shift the red-light district from down-town to the periphery. Recent years have seen for the first time immense media, public and political attention towards a red-light district in Switzerland.

However, the social structures of the Hungarian home situations of these Roma sex workers have developed in a fundamentally different direction. These women – superficially branded as suppressed, destitute and marginalised – act simultaneously as breadwinners, legal prostitutes, transnational mothers, labour migrants and space creators within Europe. The reasons for their migration can be found in weak legal conditions regarding prostitution in Hungary and also in social and economic exclusion. All reasons for migration – legal, social and economic – interrelate to space and its constitution, especially with respect to the performance of sex workers in public places. Those public sites are fiercely competitive markets, between the state (municipality) and individuals, and turn into sites of struggle. Therefore, to understand why and how Hungarian sex workers migrate to Western Europe, one has to focus first on the power struggle between sex workers and government in Hungary, where public institutions, through enactment of regulations and norms for defined territories, are supposed to define space. People who become active there use the space of action, search for niches, develop strategies and adjust to the market and law only as much as to secure their survival. These people then create a new space, which society assesses and frequently stigmatises. According to action theory, feminist approaches and the concept of performativity from body and sex, space is (re)produced not only by governments, but also by people. But space also changes people and evokes new possibilities to adjust to social frameworks, which again produce a basis for social change – whatever the outcome might be. The media have taken their focus off sex workers. Hence, they shall be given an audience in this article. Concurrently, this study tries, in a pioneering effort, to analyse prostitution spaces within the public spaces in Hungary based on three different cities: Budapest, Pécs and Nyíregyháza.