PanThe Quietus (UK)... can be read as a call to arms to society’s marginalised against the homogenisation of London’s most colourful neighbourhoods, a washing out of its messy character in place of sanitised comfort ... Mozley brings to light the depth and character of Soho’s history, holding it next to its potential future of being washed of all personality in favour of expensive housing and upscale restaurants ... the excitement and seediness of sex work make for a telling and titillating story, and by washing out the politics and leaving only the feather boas and Venetian masks with no mention of sex workers’ organising against criminalisation, Mozley is able to gentrify the mentality of sex work. Her book criticises gentrifying class wars within Soho, but Mozley’s own part in these phenomena cannot go uncritiqued. Her dumbing down and smoothing over of sex worker history is part of the gentrification process. She takes the story of sex worker survival, removes its messy history and real lived experiences, and makes it palatable for a fresher, cleaner audience. She highlights and critiques the gentrification process, and she then reinforces it ... in Mozley’s three hundred page novel, there is not a single sentence about the state apparatus that facilitates these evictions: criminalisation. None of the characters mention it, even though the book brings to light structural factors of displacement...et Mozley does not interrogate the fight for legal change and she erases the groups behind the sex worker movement while keeping their images for her book ... Mozley is aware of the politics and history yet chooses to look away. If literary gentrification is not already a term, it should be: Mozley has actively displaced the characters who made this story, to move into the area and retell the story herself. The suffering and trauma that sex workers fight against has, in her writing, become what Sarah Schulman describe as a vague unknowable ... A couple of my friends read this book at the same time as I did – between us we have over 50 years in sex work and activism – and it made for uncomfortable seeing our efforts reduced to a messy, and inaccurate, storyline. Mozley’s representations depoliticise a deeply political action ... sex workers and their community, insufficiently fleshed out, and lacking idiosyncrasy and humanity, become photocopies of photocopies: tired tropes we encounter time and again in the media. They use language which real sex workers retreat from ... Sex workers deserve better than being used as props in a story about gentrification, with their truth removed to make it more enjoyable for unfamiliar audiences. While I defend a writer’s right to tell any story they want, including about marginalised communities, I do think an element of research and accountability is needed for a finished book to be authentic. Sex workers are a secretive and intruigng subject matter, but tropes and mimic representations of them are more welcome than the people themselves. In Hot Stew Fiona Mozley has packaged up sex work into a prurient story about Soho, stripping it of all history and politics, and in doing so become every bit the gentrifier her book critiques.
