Labors of Love

Sex, Work, and Good Mothering in the Globalizing City

Bibliographic Data

ID2228699
AuthorsGowri Vijayakumar (0000-0002-2532-8083, Gender Studies, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume47
Issue3
Pages665-688
Publication date2022-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/717700
OpenAlexW4214667525
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited42

While feminist scholarship has worked to expand theorizations of sex work as reproductive labor, fewer scholars elaborate on sex workers’ role in caring work as mothers. This article draws on interviews with fifty-two cisgender women sex workers in Bangalore to argue that, for them, sex work is central to being a good mother, in a context of increasing economic precarity combined with intensified demands on mothers to provide children with middle-class consumer goods. Tracing interviewees’ paths through sex work reveals how sex workers provide necessary social and economic resources within the family while sex work allows them to attain forms of respectable femininity that other livelihood possibilities might foreclose. These navigations, for these sex workers, puncture patriarchal ideals of masculine protection as well as the neoliberal promise of upward mobility. Further, their accounts help complicate accounts of sex workers’ reproductive labor, showing how they navigate multiple gendered economic arrangements to carve out spaces of autonomy, dignity, and pride

Autonomy · Context (archaeology) · Dignity · Economic growth · Economics · Femininity · Geography · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) · Livelihood · Political science · Precarity · Scholarship · Sex work · Sociology · Women's work · Work (physics) · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Sex work and related issues

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