Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor

Sex Work and the Law in India
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-0-691-14250-0
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 298 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 567 g

Popular representations of third-world sex workers as sex slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist legal reforms that are harmful and ineffective, and public health initiatives that provide only marginal protection of sex workers' rights. In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets in India.Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kotiswaran, Prabha

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Prostitution und Sexindustrie: Soziale & Ethische Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Sozialethnologie: Familie, Gender, Soziale Gruppen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xii

Part One Theorizing Sex Work

One Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: An Introduction 3

Two Revisiting the Material: Recasting the Sex Work Debates 24

Three Theorizing the Lumpen Proletariat: A Genealogy of Materialist Feminism on Sex Work 50

Part Two The Political Economy of Sex Markets

Four Not on the Lord?s Agenda: The Traveling Sex Workers of Tirupati 85

Five Born unto Brothels: Sex Work in a Kolkata Red-Light Area 137

Part Three Toward a Theory of Redistribution in Sex Markets

Six Regulating Sex Markets: The Paradoxical Life of the Law 185

Seven Toward a Postcolonial Materialist Feminist Theory of Sex Work 212

Notes 251

References 265

Index 285

Über Autor(innen)

Kotiswaran, Prabha
Prabha Kotiswaran is lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.