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.
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