Intimate Citizenship, Sex Work, and Inequality

With his seminal work on intimate citizenship, Ken Plummer has been instrumental in critiquing and re-signifying the classical Marshallian formulation of citizenship as full membership of a community. Drawing on feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship, Plummer approached citizenship as concerned with a plurality of lived experiences, rights and obligations, and differentiated communities. In this analytical context, intimate citizenship functioned as a sensitising concept to capture and make sense of the complexity of human lives and social worlds and, as he wrote, to suggest directions to look. In this chapter, I take up Plummer’s invitation to explore new directions and reflect on how the concept of intimate citizenship and what Plummer called ‘the square of intimate citizenship’ can be used to understand the lives, exclusions and rights of sex workers.