Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor : Sex Work and the Law in India – Prabha Kotiswaran

Softback

312 pages

Princeton University Press

ISBN: 9780691142517

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, Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor.