Prostitution in the Basque Country and Nevada

Across the globe, the “world’s oldest profession” continues to ignite controversy and intrigue. Prostitution is a $186 billion dollar global industry that is characterized, practiced, and governed in highly disparate ways depending on the cultural and ideological context in which it is practiced. The scholars contributing to this volume span multiple countries and take up vastly different perspectives about sex work. The cultural framings of prostitution in the Basque country are quite different from how prostitution is framed in Nevada―the only state in the United States where prostitution is not illegal in a few areas. In some ways, prostitution is similar in both contexts: there are advocates for sex work as work in both locations, and there are anti-prostitution advocates in both contexts as well. Further, sex workers around the world face a higher risk of violence, stigma, and moral judgments about their character that can impede their everyday life experiences regardless of geographical location. Prostitution in Nevada includes illegal prostitution, occurring often on streets and in hotels. It also includes legal prostitution inside permitted brothels. The analysis of prostitution in the Basque Country must be placed within the European sociocultural and legal paradigm, where it is increasingly understood that prostitution is synonymous with human trafficking and exploitation. In the Basque case, not all prostitution is trafficking, but the vast majority is. The social cause that underlies it is fundamentally the feminization of poverty.

Born in exile in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1967, Xabier Irujo is the director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is professor of genocide studies. He was the first guest research scholar of the Manuel Irujo Chair at the University of Liverpool and has taught seminars on genocide and cultural genocide at Boise State University and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds three master’s degrees in linguistics, history, and philosophy and has two PhDs in history and philosophy. Irujo has lectured in almost one hundred American and European universities and academic or cultural institutions (typically governments, parliaments, museums, and libraries.) He has published on issues related to Basque history and politics, including genocide studies with a focus on physical and cultural extermination. He has mentored numerous graduate students and he is the member of the editorial board of four academic presses in Europe and the Americas. Irujo has authored more than fifteen books and a number of articles in journals, and he has received awards and honors at the national and international level. His recent books include Gernika: Genealogy of a Lie (Sussex Academic Press, 2018), Gernika 1937: The Market Day Massacre (University of Nevada Press, 2015) and Charlemagne’s Defeat in the Pyrenees: The Battle of Rencesvals (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2021).



Sarah Jane Blithe (PhD, University of Colorado, Boulder) is associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her expertise is in organizational communication, with specific attention to intersectional gender, work-life balance, policy inequalities, and management learning. Blithe is the author of Gender Equality and Work-Life Balance: Glass Handcuffs and Working Men in the U.S. and Sex and Stigma: Stories of Everyday Life in Nevada’s Legal Brothels, with Anna Wiederhold Wolfe and Breanna Mohr, both of which won multiple national book awards. She is also the co-editor of Badass Feminist Politics: Exploring Radical Edges of Feminist Theory, Communication, and Activism, published in 2021. Blithe is the recipient of multiple research and teaching awards, including the 2019 Thornton Peace Prize from the Nevada System of Higher Education, for her social justice advocacy.



Delegate of the Women’s Platform for the Abolition of Prostitution of Navarra (PNAP), historian, librarian, and activist, Yolanda Rodríguez Villegas is the founder of the Navarra Women’s Platform for the Abolition of Prostitution. For ten years she was a volunteer and partner of World Doctors of Navarre, and from 2014 to 2019 she became the president of this nongovernmental organization. She has a master’s in gender studies from the Public University of Navarra, and offers training lectures on prostitution, trafficking, and sexual exploitation. She has written numerous articles on the subject in specialized journals and mainstream media. As a member of the PNAP, she has participated as an expert advisor for the drafting of the Organic Law to Abolish the Prostitution System presented in November 2020.