Description
This Element argues that the sex worker character in crime narratives, often dismissed as a flat stereotype or mere plot device, actively performs crucial narratological labor that shapes the novel's realism and challenges conventional understandings of character, agency, and social reproduction. By applying Alex Woloch's theory of character-space and drawing on contemporary Black feminist scholarship that privileges power, pleasure, and desire, this study reveals how sex worker characters, through their evolving representation from marginal figures to central agents, resist narrative containment and illuminate broader socio-cultural tensions surrounding gender, class, and authority within the genre.
Table of Contents
Margins of desire: sex work and the space of the novel; 1. Knowledge, power, secrets; 2. Affect and anxiety; 3. Sex sleuths; Rewriting the terms of justice.
