Catherine Connolly

Bonnie Zare

Susan Dewey

Rhett Epler

Rosemary Bratton

A journey into the experiences of incarcerated women in rural areas, revealing how location can reinforce gendered violence Incarceration is all too often depicted as an urban problem, a male problem, a problem that disproportionately affects people of color. This book, however, takes readers to the heart of the struggles of the outlaw women of the rural West, considering how poverty and gendered violence overlap to keep women literally and figuratively imprisoned. Outlaw Women examines the forces that shape women’s experiences of incarceration and release from prison in the remote, predominantly white communities that many Americans still think of as “the Western frontier.” Drawing on dozens of interviews with women in the state of Wyoming who were incarcerated or on parole, the authors provide an in-depth examination of women’s perceptions of their lives before, during, and after imprisonment. Considering cultural mores specific to the rural West, the authors identify the forces that consistently trap women in cycles of crime and violence in these regions: felony-related discrimination, the geographic isolation that traps women in abusive relationships, and cultural stigmas surrounding addiction, poverty, and precarious interpersonal relationships. Following incarceration, women in these areas face additional, region-specific obstacles as they attempt to reintegrate into society, including limited social services, significant gender wage gaps, and even severe weather conditions that restrict travel. The book ultimately concludes with new, evidence-based recommendations for addressing the challenges these women face.

Prison, Rural Violence, and Poverty on the New American Frontier

Outlaw Women

Patty Kelly

'Policing Pleasure' examines cross-cultural public policies related to sex work, bringing together original ethnographic studies from around the worldufrom South Africa and Kenya to Mexico and India - to offer a nuanced critique of national and municipal approaches to regulating sex work.

Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective

Policing Pleasure

Treena Orchard

Tiantian Zheng

Sex work continues to provoke controversial legal and public policy debates world-wide that raise fundamental questions about the state’s role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. This book unites ethnographic research from China, Canada, and the United States to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of negative consequences for sex workers’ health, safety, and human rights. Such consequences are enabled through the operations of an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Criminalized sex workers report police harassment, seizure of condoms, and adversarial police-sex worker relations that enable others to abuse them with impunity. Chapter Three describes how sex workers negotiate these restrictions on their rights and personal autonomy via their arrest avoidance and client management strategies, self-treatment of health issues, selective mutual aid, rights-based organizing, and entrenchment in sex work or other criminalized activities. Chapter Four describes how researchers working in countries or locales that criminalize sex work face ethical concerns as well as barriers to their work at the practical, institutional, and political levels.

Ethical and Legal Issues in Exclusionary Regimes

Sex Workers and Criminalization in North America and China

Isabel Crowhurst

Chimaraoke Izugbara

"Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is about sex work and prostitution third sector organizations (TSOs): non-governmental and non-profit organizations that provide support services to, and advocate for the wellbeing of people operating in the sex industries. With a focus on three vast and extremely diverse regions, Africa, the Americas and Europe, it provides a unique vantage point that shows how interlinked these organizations' histories and configurations are. TSOs are fascinating research sites because they operate as zones of contestation which translate their understandings of sex work and prostitution into different support practices and advocacy initiatives. This book reveals that these organizations are not external to normative power but participate in it and are subject to it, conditioning how they can exist, who they can reach out to, where, and what they can achieve. This book is a resource for scholars, policymakers and activists involved in research on, and work with third sector organizations in the fields of sex work and prostitution, gender and sexuality, and human rights among others"--

Contested Engagements in Africa, the Americas and Europe

Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution

In Hollow Bodies, Susan Dewey travels to Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and India to follow the trade in women’s bodies and efforts to stop it. What she finds is a counter-trafficking system at the mercy of funds from misguided international organizations and foreign governments. From counterproductive restrictions placed on NGOs by donors, to jaded employees and bribes given to prosecutors, Dewey highlights the structural flaws in place that allow, and sometimes even help, sex trafficking to continue. Based on research conducted with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Dewey speaks with a range of actors from bar workers in Bombay to Embassy employees in Armenia and senior officials at international organizations. She discovers how a global problem plays out differently on the local level and why millions of aid dollars make little difference in the lives of women who are forced or compelled from their homes into the global sex trade.

Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India

Hollow Bodies

Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is about sex work and prostitution third sector organizations (TSOs): non-governmental and non-profit organizations that provide support services to, and advocate for the well-being of people operating in the sex industries. With a focus on three vast and extremely diverse regions, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, this book provides a unique vantage point that shows how interlinked these organizations’ histories and configurations are. TSOs are fascinating research sites because they operate as zones of contestation which translate their understandings of sex work and prostitution into different support practices and advocacy initiatives. This book reveals that these organizations are not external to normative power but participate in it and are subject to it, conditioning how they can exist, who they can reach out to, where, and what they can achieve. Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is a resource for scholars, policymakers, and activists involved in research on, and work with third sector organizations in the fields of sex work and prostitution, gender and sexuality, and human rights among others.

Tonia St. Germain

Explores encounters between those who make their living by engaging in street-based prostitution and the criminal justice and social service workers who try to curtail it Working together every day, the lives of sex workers, police officers, public defenders, and social service providers are profoundly intertwined, yet their relationships are often adversarial and rooted in fundamentally false assumptions. The criminal justice-social services alliance operates on the general belief that the women they police and otherwise regulate choose sex work as a result of traumatization, rather than acknowledging the fact that socioeconomic realities often inform their choices. Drawing on extraordinarily rich ethnographic research, including interviews with over one hundred street-involved women and dozens of criminal justice and social service professionals, Women of the Street argues that despite the intimate knowledge these groups have about each other, measures designed to help these women consistently fail because they do not take into account false assumptions about street life, homelessness, drug use and sex trading. Reaching beyond disciplinary silos by combining the analysis of an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book offers an evidence-based argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.

How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution

Women of the Street

This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated “rust belt” of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, Neon Wasteland shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town

Neon Wasteland

Routledge International Handbook of Sex Industry Research

For almost half a century, the Miss India competition has been a prominent feature of Indian popular culture, influencing, over time, the conventional standard for female beauty. As India participates increasingly in a global economy, that standard is gradually being shaped by forces beyond the country’s borders. Through the unexpected lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, Susan Dewey’s Making Miss India Miss World examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by recent political, economic, and cultural developments.

Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India

Making Miss India Miss World

This volume is the result of the many years the authors have spent conducting ethnographic field research with sex workers, conversing with other researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, developing a deep sense of empathy for the sex worker participants in the research as well as the colleagues who carry out this work with the goal of advancing social justice. They have a combined total of twenty-five years’ experience carrying out research with sex workers, and this extensive period of time has given them ample opportunity to reflect upon the topic of ethics. Sex work, defined as the exchange of sexual or sexualized intimacy for money or something of value, encompasses a wide range of legal and illegal behaviors that present researchers with key ethical challenges explored in the volume. These ethical challenges include: · Research methodology · Distinguishing research from activism · Navigating the politically and ideologically charged environments in which researchers must remain constantly attuned to the legal and public policy implications of their work · Possibilities for participatory sex work research processes · Strategies for incorporating participants in a variety of collaborative ways Sex work presents a unique set of challenges that are not always well understood by those working outside of anthropology and disciplines closely related to it. This book serves an important function by honestly and openly reviewing strategies for overcoming these ethical challenges with the end goal of producing path-breaking research that actively incorporates the perspectives of research participants on their own terms. Ever attuned to the reality that research on sex work remains a deeply political act, Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches aspires to begin a dialogue about the meanings and practices ascribed to ethics in a fraught environment. Drawing upon a review of published scholarly and activist work on the subject, as well as on interviews with researchers, social service providers, and sex workers themselves, this volume is an unprecedented contribution to the literature that will engage researchers across a variety of disciplines, such as academics and researchers in anthropology, sociology, criminal justice, and public health, as well as activists and policymakers.

Anthropological Approaches

Ethical Research with Sex Workers

Mónica waits in the Anti-Venereal Medical Service of the Zona Galactica, the legal, state-run brothel where she works in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico. Surrounded by other sex workers, she clutches the Sanitary Control Cards that deem her registered with the city, disease-free, and able to work. On the other side of the world, Min stands singing karaoke with one of her regular clients, warily eyeing the door lest a raid by the anti-trafficking Public Security Bureau disrupt their evening by placing one or both of them in jail. Whether in Mexico or China, sex work-related public policy varies considerably from one community to the next. A range of policies dictate what is permissible, many of them intending to keep sex workers themselves healthy and free from harm. Yet often, policies with particular goals end up having completely different consequences. Policing Pleasure examines cross-cultural public policies related to sex work, bringing together ethnographic studies from around the world—from South Africa to India—to offer a nuanced critique of national and municipal approaches to regulating sex work. Contributors offer new theoretical and methodological perspectives that move beyond already well-established debates between “abolitionists” and “sex workers’ rights advocates” to document both the intention of public policies on sex work and their actual impact upon those who sell sex, those who buy sex, and public health more generally.

This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated "rust belt" of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, Neon Wasteland shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

A compelling look at the ways in which youth, gender and gender identities are being transformed around the globe.

Susan Dewey

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