Precarious Empowerment

Sexual Labor in the Coffee Shops of Chile's Santiago
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-52681-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 238 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Cultural Spaces

Precarious Empowerment: Sexual Labor in the Coffee Shops of Chile’s Santiago provides a textured and telling exploration into the lives and experiences of sex workers in Chile, their encounters with discrimination and economic precarity, and their empowered resistance.

Set in and around ‘tinted cafes’ – spaces hidden from public view where women dance for their male clients and perform sexual services – within Chile’s capital city of Santiago, author Pilar Ortiz traces connections between sex work in the present day and the lasting legacies of colonialism and gender and sexual norms. Drawing on her careful ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with the workers and their clients, the book reveals the many challenges women face at the intersection of class, racial, and gender inequalities. It also documents their resistance to stigma and stifling social norms and predetermined gender roles. In their practice of sexual labor, the book argues that women display a considerable degree of agency, mobility, and empowerment. Within this contentious space, the author explores how sex workers negotiate inequalities and exclusion, and how they are poised to do so in a rapidly changing political and social climate.

Exploring experiences of sexual exploitation and resistance within Chile, this book speaks to the much larger question of agency versus oppression in conversations about sexual labor worldwide. Its compelling analysis will captivate those interested in scholarly studies of sexual labor and the ways it is performed and shaped across hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

Zielgruppe

General, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ortiz, Pilar

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Coffee and Sex: The Invisibilization of Sexual Labor  2. Sexual Labor in a Neoliberal Context  3. Mothers and Whores: Norms about Gender and Sexuality  4. Racialized Bodies and Sexualities in ‘Tinted Cafes’  5. Working with the Body and Emotions  Conclusion. Unfulfilled Demands for Recognition  Appendix I. On Embodied Ethnography and Politics of Representation

Über Autor(innen)

Pilar Ortiz is a sociologist, writer, and media artist. A recent graduate of The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, her research examines socio-spatial inequalities and the role of class, race, and gender in the exchanges that take place in public life. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Instituto Milenio VioDemos and Universidad Alberto Hurtado, where she studies the structural violence that migrant women face in various cities and borders across Chile.