
Contents
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Gendered Working Lives Gendered Working Lives
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Acceptable and Unacceptable Consumption Acceptable and Unacceptable Consumption
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Sex Workers as Neoliberal Subjects Sex Workers as Neoliberal Subjects
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Conclusion Conclusion
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4 Motherhood, Consumption, and the Purchase of Respectability
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Published:August 2016
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Abstract
Although sex work remains highly stigmatized, it allows sex workers to attain some level of economic, if not social, mobility. This chapter challenges the idea that sex work is always about mere subsistence. Instead, it suggests that sex tourism workers work to survive, but they also demonstrate significant personal ambition and aim not only to increase their own consumption levels, but to get ahead. Women are clear about what sex work enables for their families and themselves: a level of consumption otherwise unavailable to them as low-income and poor women. Sex work offers an opportunity to consume and to get ahead that these women have been unable to attain in other kinds of employment, primarily domestic and factory work. Furthermore, sex work allows women to think of themselves as particularly good mothers, able to provide for and spend important quality time with their kids. The chapter argues that survival, consumption, and motherhood are deployed, often in contradictory and conflicting ways, in order to counteract the effects that stigma has on sex workers. It also suggests that sex workers may very well be the quintessential subjects of neo-liberalism in Latin America, in their embrace of entrepreneurial work and consumption.
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