Download e-book for iPad: Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in by Prabha Kotiswaran

Popular representations of third-world intercourse staff as intercourse slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist felony reforms which are destructive and useless, and public wellbeing and fitness tasks that supply basically marginal defense of intercourse employees' rights. during this ebook, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we would comprehend intercourse employees' calls for that they be taken care of as employees. She contemplates questions of redistribution via legislation in the intercourse via studying the political economies and felony ethnographies of 2 archetypical city intercourse markets in India.

Kotiswaran carried out in-depth fieldwork between intercourse staff in Sonagachi, Kolkata's biggest red-light sector, and Tirupati, a temple city in southern India. supplying new insights into the lives of those women--many of whom are hard the distinction and criminal safeguard that different employees get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for spotting those women's sexual exertions. relocating past average feminist discourse on prostitution, she attracts on a severe family tree of materialist feminism for its refined vocabulary of woman reproductive and sexual hard work, and makes use of a criminal realist method of convey why criminalization can't be triumphant amid the casual social networks and fiscal constructions of intercourse markets. according to this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive power by means of examining the potential monetary effects of partial decriminalization, whole decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a concept of intercourse paintings from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective.