The legal regulation of gender and sexuality has undergone dramatic changes throughout Europe in the last 40 years and this has shaped what it means to be a European citizen. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary research, this book uses the discourses around current European sexual politics as an entry point to interrogate how, and with what effect, the EU and its Member States harness issues of gender and sexuality to support issues of higher political importance. It takes recent and ongoing political debates and legislative changes around prostitution and sexual assault as a focus. Using four national case studies: Poland, Germany, Sweden and Italy it illuminates how the EU's desire for increased harmonisation across the Union around gender and sexuality norms and values operates differently and with specific effects across Member States. The book's structure provides a detailed map of how and why contemporary European sexual politics is changing, and how this contributes to establishing European norms and values in developments in law and policy around prostitution and sexual assault. By examining how and why the EU and its Member States implement their policies in these two policy areas we can begin to illuminate how contemporary European sexual politics serve some groups' interests while marginalizing 'Others'.

This book addresses a gap in both contemporary theorising and empirical analysis of the European Union's (EU) law and policy frameworks on migration, sex work and anti trafficking. Drawing on the authors' previous research on these policies and with their practical experience of engaging with various EU institutions in law and policy-making fora around gender, equality and justice, the work examines the processes involved in constructing and enacting policy frameworks and legal interventions on these issues, within a feminist analytical framework. The authors map how EU agenda-setting operates, and detail the roles that various EU institutions, external groups and actors, including non-governmental organisations, play in promoting or blocking policy on these three issues. The book draws on feminist theorising on gender, policy-making and social justice to develop a general theoretical framework to help us understand how and why a consensus has seemingly been achieved at EU level on what constitutes gender equality in these three policy areas. The book presents a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy makers in Law, Migration, EU policy making and Gender Studies.

The question of how to conceptualize the relationships between governments and the everyday lives of women has long been the focus of attention among feminists. Feminist scholarship critiques women's lives, experiences and gender inequality in a variety of contexts. In this age of increased internationalism, we are witness to government actor's attempts to use women's alleged `vulnerability to justify its humanitarian interventions. Regulating the International Movement of Women interrogates western government's uses of discourses of human vulnerability as a tool to regulate non-western women's migration. In this collection of provocatively argued essays, the contributors wish to reclaim the concept of racialised and gendered vulnerability, from its under theorized, and thus, ambiguous location in feminist's theory, in a variety of methodological and geographical contexts. The book addresses the human geographer, the socio-legal and critical scholar, the sociologist, the cultural, postcolonial and political theorists and practitioners. This unique text will be of value to academics, postgraduate and research students of any of the above disciplines, as well as practitioners interested in theoretical and empirical discussions of the state, normativity and the regulation of women `s cross-border mobility.

The question of how to conceptualize the relationships between governments and the everyday lives of women has long been the focus of attention among feminists. Feminist scholarship critiques women's lives, experiences and gender inequality in a variety of contexts. In this age of increased internationalism, we are witness to government actor's attempts to use women's alleged 'vulnerability' to justify its humanitarian interventions. Regulating the International Movement of Women interrogates western government's uses of discourses of human vulnerability as a tool to regulate non-western women's migration. In this collection of provocatively argued essays, the contributors wish to reclaim the concept of racialised and gendered vulnerability, from its under theorized, and thus, ambiguous location in feminist's theory, in a variety of methodological and geographical contexts. The book addresses the human geographer, the socio-legal and critical scholar, the sociologist, the cultural, postcolonial and political theorists and practitioners.This unique text will be of value to academics, postgraduate and research students of any of the above disciplines, as well as practitioners interested in theoretical and empirical discussions of the state, normativity and the regulation of women 's cross-border mobility.