Susan Dewey
Biographic Data
| ID | 743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Dewey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Dewey |
| SIGNATURE | DEWEY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wyoming |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1584-5260 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Ethical and Pro-Social Responses to Global Social Problems: Beyond the Intractable
Culpability and Fairness: Perspectives from Women’s Prisons in the Deep South
A fundamental constitutional right provided to people in the United States’ is that everyone receives equal treatment under the law; however, the criminal justice system does not always live up to this promise. Many women perceive their justice system experiences as unfair, compounding their already extensive list of traumas in ways that affect how many women in prison view and interact with the justice system. This study’s purpose is to better u…
Approaches to Successfully Delivering Rehabilitative Services in Prison: Perspectives from Non-Uniform Correctional Staff in Eight States
Non-uniform staff help create prison social climate by providing services that include educational and vocational classes, mental health counseling, employment and reentry preparedness, and family-strengthening activities. The present study examines how non-uniform correctional staff perceive their association with successful delivery of rehabilitative services in correctional settings. After accompanying hundreds of non-uniform prison staff thro…
Gendered Prison and Reentry Experiences: Perspectives From Rural People on Parole
The present study unites and builds on existing research about gendered reentry experiences and gender-responsive approaches in prison through its analysis of 74 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with people on parole. Taking a gender-responsive approach, the project’s twofold research question asked how rural people conceptualized men’s and women’s prisons as gendered institutions and the various ways in which they understand their individual…
“I was already in the system from the start”: How substance-using women in the street sex trade make decisions about pregnancy
The present study examines how substance-using women in the street sex trade formulate understandings of pregnancy at the intersections of healthcare, social services, and family systems in ways that reflect internalized dominant cultural assumptions about substance use, motherhood, and the street sex trade. Three primary frameworks emerged with respect to pregnancy-related decision-making as prompted by heightened scrutiny, intensified stigma, a…
“You’re a product of your environment for sure”: Correctional educators on their perceptions of and contributions to prison social climate
Dying to survive: Ransom piracy and ontologies of death in Coastal Somalia
Interactions between long-term hostages and hostage takers remain undertheorized in criminology, and the present study attempts to fill this gap by utilizing testimonials from long-term hostages held aboard ships. We argue that seafarer hostages’ testimonials depict hijacked vessels as carceral sites that reflect and reproduce the global economic inequalities and racialized patterns of violence undergirding the broader geopolitics of piracy. Util…
Captive calculations and benevolent abandonment: Ransom piracy and the carceral occupation of hostage ships along the coast of Somalia
Good neighbors or good prisoners? Non-uniformed staff beliefs about incarcerated people influence prison social climate
We analyzed results from semi-structured interviews and participant observation with educators, clinical staff, and administrators who worked at nearly 100 different correctional facilities centrally managed by eight separate state prison systems to understand how the beliefs they hold about the life experiences and future trajectories of incarcerated people influence prison social climate. We found that staff who regard incarcerated people as pa…
Anthropologies of the U.S. Criminal Justice System
Outlaw Women: Prison, Rural Violence, and Poverty on the New American West
"Outlaw Women" published on by NYU Press.
Control creep and the multiple exclusions faced by women in low-autonomy sex industry sectors
This article unites the co-authors’ years of empirical research with women in policed, stigmatized, and low-autonomy sex industry sectors in Brazil, China, Italy, and the United States to identify six prevalent forms of exclusion: economic, intersectional, health, safety, public vilification, and policing. We analyze the distinct manifestations of these exclusionary forces in all four sites to introduce criminal creep as theoretical shorthand for…
Decriminalization and the Dilemmas of Regulating Prostitution
The same inequalities of sex, race, and class that pervade all aspects of life are particularly pronounced in the regulation of prostitution
The Difference a Job Makes: Licit and Illicit Work Experiences and Aspirations at a Transitional Housing Facility for Women Leaving the Sex Industry
This investigation establishes a baseline understanding of how women exiting the sex industry understand the economic options available to them by reviewing their work experiences in the legal economy, histories of sex industry involvement, and their aspirations for legal work upon entering a yearlong residential program offered at a transitional housing facility. Specifically, it explores how prior work experience, type of sex industry involveme…
Affective governance among street-involved women and their services providers
Affect modulates and directs the governance of street prostitution in encounters between street-involved women and their social services and healthcare providers through three nodes on a circuit of affect. The first is the street, constituting a set of geographic and psycho-social phenomena that exert a formative and often intergenerational impact on street-involved women’s lives. The second, selfhood, connects an understanding of trauma as inhib…
Routledge International Handbook of Sex Industry Research
The Routledge International Handbook of Sex Industry Research unites 45 contributions from researchers, sex workers, activists, and practitioners who live and work in 28 countries throughout the world. Focusing tightly on the contemporary state of sex industry research through eight carefully selected themes, this volume sets a clear agenda for future research, activism, and policymaking. Approaching the topic from a multidisciplinary perspective…
Shared Precarities and Maternal Subjectivities: Navigating Motherhood and Child Custody Loss Among North American Women in Street-Based Sex Work
Drawing upon over a decade of research in our respective communities, we argue that the intergenerational socioeconomic insecurities and violence prevalent in the lives of North American street-involved women, their families, and others in their social circles constitute a set of shared precarities. Taking both socioinstitutional and interpersonal forms, shared precarities obviate the women's rights to access the lived experience and social statu…
Sex Work
Sex work is an umbrella term that refers to the continuum of behaviors and cultural practices surrounding the exchange of intimacy for money or something of value, and includes diverse forms of paid labor such as erotic dance or other sexualized performances, pornography, and prostitution.
Women of the Street: How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution
This is a book about people who make their living by engaging in street-based sex trading and criminal justice and social services efforts to curtail it through the work of police officers, public defenders, judges, probation officers, or court-mandated therapeutic treatment providers. Coauthored by an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book explores these interactions and the cultural context in which they take place by drawing upon six yea…
Ontologies of Blame and the Cultural Value of Accountability: Formerly Incarcerated Women’s Narratives
Uniting the perspective of narrative psychology with feminist and narrative criminology, we analyzed interviews with 58 formerly incarcerated women. We identified four distinct ontologies of blame that the women used to characterize the events, actors, and circumstances that resulted in their incarceration. We argue that these four ontologies of blame—personal responsibility, socioeconomic exclusion, relational caregiving associations, and compro…
Sex Workers and Criminalization in North America and China: Ethical and Legal Issues in Exclusionary Regimes
Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective
Two anonymous reviewers offered helpful feedback and constructive criticism that resulted in a
Alicia W. Peters. Responding to Human Trafficking: Sex, Gender, and Culture in the Law
Alicia Peters’ balanced ethnography, based on her interviews and participant observation in New York City and Washington, DC with the social services and criminal justice professionals who attempt
Transitional Housing Facilities for Women Leaving the Sex Industry: Informed by Evidence or Ideology
Characteristics of Women Seeking Services at a Transitional Housing Facility for Women Leaving Street-Based Sex Work: Implications for Social Service Providers
Women who decide to leave street-based sex work often struggle with addiction, trauma-related mental health consequences, and exclusion from employment and housing. To offer recommendations for social service providers, this article draws upon primary data from interviews and surveys with 87 residents at a transitional housing facility for women leave sex work to elucidate: 1) a demographic profile of the women, 2) life history patterns and circu…
It Depends on the Cop: ” Street-Based Sex Workers’ Perspectives on Police Patrol Officers
Shared Precarities and Maternal Subjectivities: Navigating Motherhood and Child Custody Loss Among North American Women in Street-Based Sex Work
Drawing upon over a decade of research in our respective communities, we argue that the intergenerational socioeconomic insecurities and violence prevalent in the lives of North American street-involved women, their families, and others in their social circles constitute a set of shared precarities. Taking both socioinstitutional and interpersonal forms, shared precarities obviate the women's rights to access the lived experience and social statu…
The Feminized Labor of Sex Work: Two Decades of Feminist Historical and Ethnographic Research
Drawing upon labor-oriented historical and social science research on sex work in the Americas throughout the past twenty years, this article discusses key themes that have emerged in this work: (1) sex work's close resemblance to many other forms of feminized labor; (2) the interconnected nature of sex work with other aspects of the economic processes that impact the working poor; (3) the prominent (and generally unacknowledged) role sex work pl…
Ontologies of Blame and the Cultural Value of Accountability: Formerly Incarcerated Women’s Narratives
Uniting the perspective of narrative psychology with feminist and narrative criminology, we analyzed interviews with 58 formerly incarcerated women. We identified four distinct ontologies of blame that the women used to characterize the events, actors, and circumstances that resulted in their incarceration. We argue that these four ontologies of blame—personal responsibility, socioeconomic exclusion, relational caregiving associations, and compro…
Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk
Book Review| September 01 2015 Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk. Chateauvert, Melinda. Boston: Beacon, 2014 248 pp., $25.95 (paper) Susan Dewey Susan Dewey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2015) 12 (3): 104–106. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2920483 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Link…
Sex Workers/Sex Offenders: Exclusionary Criminal Justice Practices in New Orleans
Until 2012, the New Orleans criminal justice system forced persons convicted of certain prostitution offenses to register as sex offenders under an antiquated (1805) statute that criminalizes oral or anal sex in exchange for compensation. This article explores attitudes and beliefs that enabled Louisiana’s misuse of the sex offender registry against primarily indigent African American street-based sex worker women and transgender individuals. Fin…
Social Services Fatigue in Domestic Violence Service Provision Facilities
Findings presented here draw upon 9 months of ethnographic research in three domestic violence service provision facilities as a means to articulate the key elements of social services fatigue, a phenomenon resulting from residents’ need to (1) document progress toward self-sufficiency, (2) use particular language and behavior in the presence of staff as a means to demonstrate this progress, (3) actively engage with staff and advocate volunteers,…
Transitional Housing Facilities for Women Leaving the Sex Industry: Informed by Evidence or Ideology
Characteristics of Women Seeking Services at a Transitional Housing Facility for Women Leaving Street-Based Sex Work: Implications for Social Service Providers
Women who decide to leave street-based sex work often struggle with addiction, trauma-related mental health consequences, and exclusion from employment and housing. To offer recommendations for social service providers, this article draws upon primary data from interviews and surveys with 87 residents at a transitional housing facility for women leave sex work to elucidate: 1) a demographic profile of the women, 2) life history patterns and circu…
Captive calculations and benevolent abandonment: Ransom piracy and the carceral occupation of hostage ships along the coast of Somalia
Anthropologies of the U.S. Criminal Justice System
Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state
The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state's everyday operations in…
Recovery Narratives, War Stories, and Nostalgia: Street-Based Sex Workers’ Discursive Negotiations of the Exclusionary Regime
This article draws upon 18 months of participant observation with 50 street-based sex workers living in a transitional housing facility. Subsequent in-depth interviews with 50 different women actively working on the street also inform analysis presented here, which explores discursive practice as one of the most salient means by which women maneuver within a socio-legal system that targets them as individuals engaged in criminalized behavior. Fin…
Justice on whose terms? A critique of international criminal justice responses to conflict-related sexual violence
Markets and Women’s Market Trading in the Pacific Islands: An Overview of Social Contexts and Ongoing Challenges
Imperial designs, post-colonial replications: Class and power at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay
Utilizing a framework which employs symbolic capital and post-colonial analysis, this paper examines the cultural meanings of English-language education at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, India. The central question this article seeks to address is how power is replicated through education and, more specifically, the ways in which formerly British colonial systems of education are maintained as markers of success and prestige in urban…
How Do You Like Me Now: Exploring Subjectivities and Home/Field Boundaries in Research with Women in Sex Work
Anthropological analyses of blurred researcher-participant relationships and fieldwork boundaries in settings that double as the field and the researcher's home typically focus on the anthropologist's experiences, to the exclusion of how participants construct their own subjectivities in these fluid field sites. Using ethnographic vignettes from our research with women in sex work conducted in the neighbourhoods and services provision sites where…
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Imperial designs, post-colonial replications: Class and power at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay
Utilizing a framework which employs symbolic capital and post-colonial analysis, this paper examines the cultural meanings of English-language education at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, India. The central question this article seeks to address is how power is replicated through education and, more specifically, the ways in which formerly British colonial systems of education are maintained as markers of success and prestige in urban…
“Dear Dr. Kothari …”: Sexuality, violence against women, and the parallel public sphere in India
In India, cultural prohibitions on discussions about sexuality and violence against women have resulted in a parallel public sphere in which individuals make use of popular culture to resolve private dilemmas. In this article, I examine how female discourse regarding two highly publicized cases of violence against women in Mumbai employed the parallel public sphere, a cultural phenomenon that allows individual normalcy to be gauged as part of a b…
Choosing Sex Work over Public Assistance
Janine Wedel is contributing editor of "Research on Policy," the AAA Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy column in Anthropology News
Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia by Jonathan Spencer
Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective
Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver
Book Review| May 01 2011 Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver Becki L. Ross Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 xix + 373 pp., $70.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper) Susan Dewey Susan Dewey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2011) 8 (2): 168–170. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1158994 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permiss…
Markets and Women’s Market Trading in the Pacific Islands: An Overview of Social Contexts and Ongoing Challenges
The Feminized Labor of Sex Work: Two Decades of Feminist Historical and Ethnographic Research
Drawing upon labor-oriented historical and social science research on sex work in the Americas throughout the past twenty years, this article discusses key themes that have emerged in this work: (1) sex work's close resemblance to many other forms of feminized labor; (2) the interconnected nature of sex work with other aspects of the economic processes that impact the working poor; (3) the prominent (and generally unacknowledged) role sex work pl…
Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches
"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 w…
I've Got to Make My Livin' ”: Black Women's Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
Book Review| March 01 2013 “I've Got to Make My Livin' ”: Black Women's Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago “I've Got to Make My Livin' ”: Black Women's Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. Blair, Cynthia. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2010 344 pp., $40.00 (cloth); $7.00–$32.00 (e-book) Susan Dewey Susan Dewey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2013) 10 (1): 136–138. https://doi.org/10.1215/…
Justice on whose terms? A critique of international criminal justice responses to conflict-related sexual violence
Sex Workers/Sex Offenders: Exclusionary Criminal Justice Practices in New Orleans
Until 2012, the New Orleans criminal justice system forced persons convicted of certain prostitution offenses to register as sex offenders under an antiquated (1805) statute that criminalizes oral or anal sex in exchange for compensation. This article explores attitudes and beliefs that enabled Louisiana’s misuse of the sex offender registry against primarily indigent African American street-based sex worker women and transgender individuals. Fin…
It Depends on the Cop: ” Street-Based Sex Workers’ Perspectives on Police Patrol Officers
Social Services Fatigue in Domestic Violence Service Provision Facilities
Findings presented here draw upon 9 months of ethnographic research in three domestic violence service provision facilities as a means to articulate the key elements of social services fatigue, a phenomenon resulting from residents’ need to (1) document progress toward self-sufficiency, (2) use particular language and behavior in the presence of staff as a means to demonstrate this progress, (3) actively engage with staff and advocate volunteers,…
Recovery Narratives, War Stories, and Nostalgia: Street-Based Sex Workers’ Discursive Negotiations of the Exclusionary Regime
This article draws upon 18 months of participant observation with 50 street-based sex workers living in a transitional housing facility. Subsequent in-depth interviews with 50 different women actively working on the street also inform analysis presented here, which explores discursive practice as one of the most salient means by which women maneuver within a socio-legal system that targets them as individuals engaged in criminalized behavior. Fin…
Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk
Book Review| September 01 2015 Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk. Chateauvert, Melinda. Boston: Beacon, 2014 248 pp., $25.95 (paper) Susan Dewey Susan Dewey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2015) 12 (3): 104–106. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2920483 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Link…
Sex Workers and Criminalization in North America and China: Ethical and Legal Issues in Exclusionary Regimes
Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective
Two anonymous reviewers offered helpful feedback and constructive criticism that resulted in a
Alicia W. Peters. Responding to Human Trafficking: Sex, Gender, and Culture in the Law
Alicia Peters’ balanced ethnography, based on her interviews and participant observation in New York City and Washington, DC with the social services and criminal justice professionals who attempt
Transitional Housing Facilities for Women Leaving the Sex Industry: Informed by Evidence or Ideology
Characteristics of Women Seeking Services at a Transitional Housing Facility for Women Leaving Street-Based Sex Work: Implications for Social Service Providers
Women who decide to leave street-based sex work often struggle with addiction, trauma-related mental health consequences, and exclusion from employment and housing. To offer recommendations for social service providers, this article draws upon primary data from interviews and surveys with 87 residents at a transitional housing facility for women leave sex work to elucidate: 1) a demographic profile of the women, 2) life history patterns and circu…
Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state
The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state's everyday operations in…
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (30 works) · Sex work and related issues (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Criminology (21 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Medicine (9 works)