Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

So, yesterday, I related Agustin’s discussion of her fieldwork with the Progresistas, an organization that advocates for the rights of sex workers, mostly by handing out condoms. They believe that solidarity — among sex workers and between all women — is the method for obtaining women’s rights. As a consequence, they have a tendency to […]

So, why the title of the earlier post, pt 1 of a discussion of Agustin’s Chapter, ‘From Charity to Solidarity,’ from her book, _Sex on the Margins? I entitled that post, “Did you hear the one about a sex club owner and some nuns?”
Agustin draws on her fieldnotes, which she sets of in sans serif […]

I’m going to skip ahead to the chapter I’d mentioned was most interesting in Augustin’ book, _Sex on the Margins_, which comes toward the end of the book. This is partly because I figure I won’t have time to get to the rest of the book before it’s due back from interlibrary loan. But it’s […]

as I mentioned in an earlier post, Agustin’s second chapter, “Working to Travel; Traveling to Work,” in her book, Sex at the Margins, intervenes into a set of binary oppositions we hold about traveling, work, migrancy, agency, autonomy, and victims.
The discourse around migrancy, Agustin argues, too often views women as having no agency. They are, […]

there’s this guy on lbo who spend 99% of the time pulling stuff out of his ass and flinging it around so everyone else can enjoy the stench. which is to say, he’s almost always writing from the cuff, asking questions that would have been answered had he actually bothered to read the post or […]

while this is out of order, I couldn’t resist writing a bit about Agustin’s ethnographically thick description of attending a conference on prostitution, one led by what we typically call abolitionists — activists who are opposed to prostitution and want to abolish it.
Agustin calls them moral entrepreneurs, which tickled me because it’s an old term […]

dayum. I’m on the last chapter of agustin’s book where it gets really really good. she’s moving between thick description, anthropology-style, and analysis, covering things like the imposition of solidarity on sex workers on the part of progressive women who hand out condoms. they aren’t the moralizing sisters who are trying to rescue. no. they […]

a few years ago, in some one or other of the various instantiations of some sex war over prostitution, I pointed out at punkass blog that I knew of at least two women who had migrated from a rural area to an urban area and that they did so wanting to be sex workers. This […]

if you have any interest at all in sex work, sex positive feminism, migrants, migrant workers, the prostitution wars then you really must read Laura Maria Augstin’s _Sex on the Margins_. I’ve mentioned her work before, quoting her articles and blog, and posting an interview with her on Doug Henwood’s radio program, Behind the News.
I […]

Helping Women Who Sell Sex: The Construction of Benevolent Identities
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This article addresses the governmental impulse to name particular commercial-sex practices as ‘prostitution’ and its practitioners as ‘prostitutes.’ Although it is conventional to refer to ‘the world’s oldest profession,’ the term prostitution has never described a clearly defined activity and was constructed by particular social actors […]

an awesome interview with Laura D’Agustin, who also has a new blog, where I found this interview. the rest of it is about the panic that surrounds sex work, border crossing, and the rescue industry:
Most people do not arrive penniless, they arrive with their own or borrowed money, even if the amounts don’t seem large […]