In this article, I use Inkson’s career metaphors in order to structure an analysis of the narratives of 14 current and former sex workers in the Australian sex industry. This article examines participants’ meaning-making of their careers as: a story; a legacy of gendered and socio-economic constraints; as intertwined with the life cycle; as carefully crafted and planned; and as a networked practice involving social relationships. Participants’ narratives demonstrated both the complex construction of career meaning within the life narrative, as well as the agentic and creative configuration of life and career undertaken by participants. This reconfiguration of sex work as career allows it to be positioned more clearly within the fabric of women’s actual lives. This reconfiguration both undermines stereotypes of sex workers as victims in need of ‘saving’ while simultaneously offering a challenge to individualized understandings of sex industry work as merely a matter of personal choice.
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