Introduction to Reader on Sex Work

Abstract

This chapter is an Introduction to a Reader on Sex Work that I edited for an Indian feminist press for their series on Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism. The introduction provides a critical introduction to and overview of the volume which is organised into four major sections. These broadly relate to the colonial legal histories of sex work, the post-independence feminist debates on sex work, some contemporary ethnographies of sex work and the mobilisational politics of sex workers themselves. The last section includes documents and manifestos from the sex workers’ movement.