Konstruktioner av en sexköpare : en diskursteoretisk analys av offentliga dokument

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to present dominant discourses of sex buyers in public documents published before and after the implementation of the Swedish sex buyer law; making the purchase but not the sale of sexual services illegal. The purpose is further to examine what consequences these discourses might have on social work with sex buyers. We also aim to illustrate how language, gender, sexuality and power can be understood in the reading of the empirical material stretching from 1981 to 2016. With a discourse theoretical approach drawn from Laclau and Mouffe (2008 [1985]), five prominent discourses are identified; the average man, the homosexual man, the woman as a sex buyer, the man with the problematic sexuality and the sex buyer in need of help. The main findings are that processes of conflict among the discourses outlines a social problem where discourses that don’t include the heterosexual man as a sex buyer are subdued. Gender and sexuality in general and male heterosexual sexuality in particular is performed. As demands on a stricter legislation is propositioned we identified a linguistic offset; from descriptive graphic characteristics of the sex buyer to a depersonalization focusing on the action rather than the actor.