Akoya’s Managing Editor, Hannah Boursnell, interviews Sine Plambech about her new book Global Sex.

 

The first photograph in Global Sex is of a towering pile of the notebooks you use to record your observations while working in the field. Can you tell us when you had the idea to turn all those many years of notes and research into a book, and why the time felt right to do so? 

We are seeing more migration across the world, including to Europe, and life is becoming even harder for many of the people I met along the routes as an anthropologist. I felt it was time to tell more personal stories about the people who are trying to reach Europe and who are trying to create a better life for themselves. 

 At the same time, I found myself at a point in my own life where I wanted to look back and reflect on my working life – and on all the people I had encountered along the way. In my personal life, too, I needed to pause. I had just lost my mother, and with that loss came a strong need to rethink my life. My notebooks are sort of ‘witnesses’ to my life, and as I re-read them, I began to see the outlines of larger patterns I could describe, alongside deeply personal stories of women – and, woven through them, my own story. 

 

Once you had decided to write the book, how long did it take you to write? Did you have to undertake additional research to complete the manuscript? 

It took me around three to four years to write the book. Much of it grew out of research I had already carried out, but I travelled to Dubai and Sicily to make sure what I was writing was grounded in the most up‑to‑date realities. 

Along the way, I made journeys back and forth to read the drafts aloud to the women whose stories are part of the book. This was an essential part of our collaboration. Sitting together with the text, listening to their responses, new stories often emerged.  

We often think of anthropologists as impartial observers, writing about their subjects from a position of distanced objectivity. But your close friendships with Sommai, Becky, Lom and Vivian, the four women who feature in the book, is one of its strongest and most impactful themes. Why was it important to you to showcase your close bond with these women, and the way that your lives have become intertwined over the years? 

It wasn’t something I planned  to happen, but in anthropology we are fortunate to have the privilege of following people over many years. Over these years, I became friends with the women in the book. Relationships change when you come to know each other’s children – they have watched my children grow up, and I have watched theirs grow up; when you’re there for children’s birthday parties and for funerals, relations will of course change. This was something I wanted to write into the book. As I grew older, had children and lost my mother, I began to ask different questions. I could also see that different things had become important to the women. That was one part of it. 

The other part was my wish to create a counternarrative to the polished, often white researcher who arrives, observes others, withdraws again, and treats people as if they are merely data. I wanted to challenge that image of the researcher or anthropologist who comes in and extracts knowledge. I wanted to insist that if we truly want to understand the world, we have to enter into these relationships. 

Throughout the book, your children accompany you on your research trips, and are often an integral part of your relationship with the sex workers you spend time with and their own children. Can you talk a bit about why you decided to include them in this work? 

I had my first child when I was nineteen, and since I have a working life as a researcher, I sometimes have to bring my children with me so that I am not away from them for too long. It was never a strategy. It was simply the kind of motherhood that sometimes unfolds when you have this kind of work. 

Over time, though, bringing my children with me became more and more integrated into the way I worked. I have four children, and all of them have been part of my travels. Only later did I come to understand – or perhaps to learn – that when we share parts of ourselves, we are often met with great generosity in return. 

The women in my book have seen my family life and my motherhood up close. They have seen that I was willing to bring my children to the places they come from, not treating those places as something dangerous. And that, in turn, has made them feel able to share very intimate thoughts about motherhood, parenthood and all the worries that come with it. In a way, my children also helped open up a generosity – the people I met were willing to share. 

In the book, you say, ‘I think we need to be more exposed. I think we have to go deeper, messier, braver.’ Can you explain why you believe radical candour and vulnerability is important in this sort of storytelling, and was it difficult to lay yourself and your emotions bare in this way? 

I think this matters because so often we ask marginalised, vulnerable or stigmatised groups to lay their lives bare. We ask them deeply personal questions both in research, but also in the media. We make a claim on their vulnerability, on their private and personal stories, without ever feeling that we ourselves should share anything in return. Of course, that is often because what we think or feel is not considered particularly interesting. But in this context, I had known the women for so long, and I could clearly see the enormous difference between the privileges I have in my life, in a welfare society like Denmark, and the possibilities available to them in theirs. So, I made a deal with myself: that all the vulnerable, awkward and private questions I had asked them over the years, I would also ask myself – in order to show what a difference it makes where you are born. 

All the things that carry shame – abortions, divorces, debt, grief, motherhood – are experiences most people go through in one way or another. But where you are born determines what possibilities you have for moving on. 

Did any of the women who feature in the book have any reservations about you sharing their stories? Do you have a sense of the reasons why they were ultimately happy to do so? 

I never experienced any hesitation on their part about taking part. They each had their own reasons for wanting to be involved. They knew I was there as an anthropologist and they understood my purpose – but at the same time, there was a deep sense of trust between us developed over the many years we’ve known each other.  

It is quite extraordinary that four sex workers chose to come forwards using their real names, because so often people in sex work prefer anonymity due to the stigma that surrounds it. I am incredibly grateful for that and deeply proud of them. 

For Sommai, it was important to explain why she had left her country and sold sex: she wanted it to be clear that she had done it for her family. It was important to her that this story lived on – that she was not seen as someone who had gone for her own sake alone, but for the sake of her family. Lom wanted to take part in the book because she wanted to be able to share it with her children, as a way of showing them how she had supported them – and that is now possible with Akoya’s English edition. And Vivian was driven by something similar – she also wanted to share what it is like to be a woman like her, from Nigeria, and what she has been through. They each came into the project with their own reasons, their own hopes for what telling their story might mean. 

Something you grapple with throughout the book is your privilege – as a white woman from Denmark – relative to the sex workers whose lives you are researching. Did that affect your writing in any unexpected or challenging ways? 

What this has meant, in practice, is that I decided it should not only be them who answer the vulnerable and shame‑laden questions – I should too. Through that, I wanted to make an analysis of how where we are born actually impacts us. There is a very real difference between being born into a white welfare society like Denmark and being born with other nationalities that make life far more difficult. 

I also didn’t want it to remain at the level of what can become a familiar anthropological gesture: I know I’m privileged . . . and then simply carrying on. I wanted to say that a disclaimer is not enough. You have to really go into what that privilege means. In the book, I therefore also write about my own family’s journey to south‑eastern Africa, and about the double bind within a family history where some people, in the past, were involved in colonialism or late colonialism, even if they never directly harmed anyone. 

We need the courage to wash our dirty laundry when it comes to our own histories, instead of only writing about vulnerable people. We also need to look our own implication straight in the eye. It was never my desire to centre myself or to make the book about me. But I did want to say this: I cannot pretend that I am not a white woman from a welfare society, with a long education, writing this book. That is something I cannot step outside of. 

Perhaps I can put it the way same way as I do in the book: The asymmetry between us never disappears, because world history is always flowing painfully between us. And that is what I try to write towards – what that actually means. 

Global Sex was published in Denmark in 2023. What has the response been like from readers, and more broadly from those involved in your field of work? 

The women are very proud of the book, and they are also really looking forward to it being published in English. Even though they have already heard me read from it, the English edition means they can now share it with their families and their children, and that matters a great deal to them. They attended the reception at my Danish publisher, Gyldendal, signed books, and were deeply honored that their stories were something people genuinely wanted to listen to. I am still in regular contact with all of them. 

As for the readers, many have told me they read the book in two days and cried a great deal along the way. They were surprised by that experience, especially because it is a work of non‑fiction. But it is a non‑fiction book written with a broad readership in mind. I really wanted to write a book that ensured these women’s stories were not told in vain. I wanted it to reach as many people as possible, and to draw in readers who might not normally read non‑fiction. Sex workers, migrant women and the daughters and sons of sex workers and migrant women have read it. And it has been read by a remarkably wide cross‑section of the Danish population – truly, very widely, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. 

There is a new foreword to the English edition of Global Sex, in which you touch on some of the issues facing sex workers in the UK. What do you hope people reading this edition – in the UK and elsewhere in the world – will take away from the experience? What would be your one main call to action? 

I hope that UK readers will take from this book that it is not only about sex work, but about the world we live in. It is about capitalism, bodies and gender, and about migration policies – and about migration more broadly, which also affects the UK. 

I hope it will encourage people to look at some of the most vulnerable individuals – migrant sex workers – in a different, less prejudiced way. To see them as the mothers, sisters and daughters they are, and to recognise the responsibility they are trying to carry for families who are far away. 

And finally, although this book is the culmination of many years of work, it is clear it is also just the beginning of opening up vital conversations about migration and the social and economic inequalities that drive sex work. Where will your work take you next, and what are the next big challenges to tackle? 

My next book is about migration across the Mediterranean. But it is told through the close and intimate account of the life of a small family that is torn apart by the sea, with me, as an anthropologist, guiding readers through their lives. The book also focuses on the broader, global questions around migration. And it looks at some of the many people who are trying to make a difference – the rescuers at sea – and asks what has happened to empathy and solidarity in the world we are living in.