Crafting vulneramentality: Vulnerability (and resistance) among migrants with experiences of sex work in Malta

In this paper, I explore the concept of ‘vulnerability’ from the perspective of migrant sex workers living in Malta, a small island in the Mediterranean affected by international migration flows, which has recently witnessed political debate over the reform of sex work policies. Drawing on the lived experiences of a group of people who are commonly labelled ‘vulnerable’, the article presents a relational understanding of vulnerability as fluid across time and space and articulated on four levels (systemic, societal, situational and individual). It critically discusses aspects such as criminalisation, lack of protection, violence by clients and exploitation through the eyes of migrants with experiences of sex work; whilst concurrently highlighting, wherever possible, the resistance strategies they deploy to prevent and contrast different vulnerabilities. The analysis shows that understanding vulnerability in migrant sex work requires taking stock of migration regimes, their impact on the push to migrate and on the experience of migration, whilst also paying attention to criminalisation and widespread gaps in protection for sex workers. These phenomena jointly contribute to migrant sex workers experiencing ‘vulneramentality’, namely a form of governing, controlling and categorising populations rooted in vulnerability. Vulneramentality exacerbates extant vulnerabilities, pushing further to the margins already marginalised populations. It also creates novel ones, where they did not originally exist, with the ultimate objective of further entrenching exclusion. As witnessed in Malta, vulnerability has tangible reverberations over migrant sex workers’ safety from violence and exploitation. Although they creatively leverage different strategies to resist systemic vulnerabilities depending on their personal resources, their social positioning and their location within the sex work industry, their ability to resist restrictive systemic factors remains, understandably, limited. Resisting vulneramentality cannot be an individual endeavour: it requires structured and coordinated reform at different levels of society.