Description
Book SynopsisPopular 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. This book asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers.
Trade ReviewCo-Winner of the 2012 Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics, Socio-Legal Studies Association "Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor is a book that deserves respect for its painstaking efforts to present a view 'from below', and to incorporate the voice of the sex worker herself, not only that of the slave but also of the self-employed prostitute-housewife who earns much more than her unsuspecting husband. It provides a wealth of information about the organisation of prostitution and the law in India--a field with many keep-out signs for 'outsiders.' Only a courageous and sensitive researcher can find a way to get in."--Times Higher Education "[F]ascinating and illuminating... Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor offers a sincere effort in presenting a genuinely contextualized understanding of sex work from sex worker's perspectives, and avoids abstractionist theorizing. This book offers a great thinking ground for readers by creating a remarkably large space for them to do their own theorizing."--Raadhika Gupta, Harvard Journal of Law & Gender "Drawing on perspectives of the sex worker movement in India, Kotiswaran advocates decriminalization of sex work along with self-organization in order for sex workers to realize their rights."--Choice "Kotiswaran's sophisticated and informative theoretical and legal perspective, while occasionally beyond the main boundaries of anthropology, sheds a great deal of light on a difficult and 'invisible' subject, and if it does not decisively point the way, it at least elucidates the contours and contradictions in the 'elusive quest for justice' for women performing sex work."--Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database "Kotiswaran's book is a welcome addition to the literature on sex work... [The] book is exceptional in the way that it weaves depth of theory with integrity of field work. Kotiswaran not only leaves the reader with many new thoughts but also makes material feminism and legal ethnography a pleasure to engage with."--Sameena Dalwai, Social & Legal Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
