The starting assumption of this chapter is that a fundamental goal of feminism is to challenge the political, social, and economic structures that support gender oppression, with a focus on the exploitation of women through sexual relationships and practices. Feminism in the Global West has had an uneasy relationship with sex work activism over the past 40 years. Some feminists have viewed ‘prostitution’ as a signature form of violence against women and exploitation of women's embodied labour, while others have argued that sex work is part of a larger project to dismantle the strictures of gender and sexuality norms. On this second account, sex work is a key battleground for challenging the economic exploitation women face in paid employment and their unremunerated, socially reproductive labour or embodied care work. Despite the persistent skirmishes following the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s that pitted feminists, and sex workers, against each other over matters of commercial and public sexual labour, many sex workers are feminists, and many feminists are committed to working collaboratively with sex workers to understand their needs (O’Neill, 2010; Harrington, 2017).

This chapter considers how feminism in New Zealand has arrived at its current state and what future possibilities for feminist sex work activism spring from its history. As the historical survey in the first section reveals, feminist and sex work activism in New Zealand have been more complementary here than almost anywhere else in the Global West, setting up a tantalising promise of continued mutually reinforcing visions and praxis. Pointing to certain limits – some necessary, some unfortunate – in both movements to date, it considers how the current political moment offers the opportunity for feminist sex work activism to tackle ongoing forms of oppression rooted in material and cultural structures and practices that feminist and sex worker movements still need to address.