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This article explores the issue of remunerated sex by examining the way in which French law differentiates between activities that all imply that sexual practices are exchanged for money. The hypothesis is that these activities are defined within very different discursive spaces, which have produced contrasting ‘prostitutional’ figures that cannot be reduced to predetermined gender stereotypes. An analysis of the law through the prism of gender thus implies that we should stay attentive to the transformation of these stereotypes: legal narratives are open to varied interpretations and can accommodate a multiplicity of definitions of women’s, and to the possible inversion of power relations.