GENDER AND POWER ON THE STREETS - STREET PROSTITUTION IN THE ERA OF CRACK COCAINE

This article examines the relationships between street prostitutes and men on the streets who are not their clientele (pimps, drug dealers, and other drug users), in the context of the urban drug environment. T he crack scene provides an important example of how gender relations s hift and are reconstituted in changing environments. Women who engaged in sex-for-money exchanges on the streets to support their crack use defined themselves as independent from male control because they were seldom involved in traditional pimping relationships. However, closer examination reveals the many ways in which they continued to face form s of disempowerment and dependence in relation to drug dealers and use rs on the streets, resulting in a shift of the content of gendered pow er relations but not in the overall form of gendered domination.