Congratulations to Associate Professor Ummni Khan, who has received a fully funded SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her project entitled, “Sex Buyer Beware: Constructions and Representations of Sex Trade Clients and Their Impact on Law”.
The main aim of this project is to delineate and assess how dominant images and narratives of male clients in popular discourse may impact the legal regulation of sex work in Canadian society.
Using a cross-disciplinary approach that incorporates legal and cultural studies, Khan considers how cultural discursive fields, whether news agencies reporting “facts”, or Hollywood films providing “entertainment”, engage with the construction and contestation of legal subjects. She suggests that the legal debate on sex work explicitly or implicitly interacts with the media and mainstream movies, and further seeks to uncover how the recent spectacle of male clients in cultural discourses may perpetuate hegemonic racial, sexual, national, ableist, class and gender norms in law and society.