Dear Higher Education There Are Sex Workers On Your Campus

The purpose of this study was to explore the realities of U.S. college students engaged in sex work. Specifically, I focused on motivations, histories, how social identity in relation to power informed their sex worker experience, what/how they were learning as a result of sex work, and what college and university leaders could do to support them. I focused on college student sex workers with racially and sexually minoritized identities. I used a genre-blurred critical narrative inquiry that combined aspects of the biographical genre (life history) and the art-based genre (creative non-fiction). Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) and the polymorphous paradigm (Weizter, 2010) served as the theoretical framework for the inquiry and the Listening Guide (Gilligan, 2015) served as my analysis process. I developed six key findings including: critical differences between student sex workers with minoritized racial and sexual identities and those with dominant social identities, queer (in)visibility as it relates to their sex work, a lack of trust in college/university administrators, a lack of their ability to imagine how institutional leaders could (or would) support them; a clarity of: power and dominance, the violence of men, and a development of their overall confidence. I offer a discussion of the findings, implications, and future directions for this area of research and inquiry.