Sexed Work: Gender, Race, and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market

by Lisa Maher

Overview

Based on three years of ethnographic work in New York City, this book provides the first detailed account of the economic lives of women drug users. Set in a neighborhood plagued with AIDS, Sexed Work reveals the economic lives of a group of women whose options have been severely circumscribed, not only by drug use, but also by poverty, racism, violence, and enduring marginality. Maher draws extensively on the women's own words to describe how structures and relations of gender, race and class are articulated by divisions of labor in the street-level drug economy. This rich, nuanced and theoretically sophisticated study of "crime as work" will be compelling reading for all those interested in the way in which women deal with the intersection of gender, race, and work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198264958
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/06/1997
Series:	Clarendon Studies in Criminology
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lisa Maher, Research Fellow in the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre and the School of Community Medicine, University of New South Wales

Table of Contents

1: Readings of Victimization and Volition
2: Taking it on the Street
3: Gender, Work, and Informalization
4: A Reserve Army: Women and the Drug Market
5: Jobs for the Boyz: Street Hustles
6: A Hard Road to Ho: Sexwork
7: Intersectionalities: Gender, Race and Class
8: The Reproduction of Inequalities
Appendix: On Reflexivity, Reciprocity, and Ethnographic Research

Editorial Reviews

"Maher does a superior job of challenging current conceptions of women's position and behavior in the street-level drug economy. An excellent examination of an often misunderstood and overlooked group and is informative for people from many disciplines."
—Choice

"An important contribution to the literature and will improve any reader's understanding of the inner workings of the drug world."
—Professor Christopher Krebs, Florida State University in Journal of Drug Issues

"Among the most important contemporary feminist scholarship in criminology. Excellent scholarship, deserving a wide readership."
—Professor Jody Miller in Theoretical Criminology

"A landmark work in social study. A rich mix of field study, sociological scholarship and theoretical analysis, [and] a portrait of prohibition drug policy in action. An unusual blend of savvy street ethnographer and rigourous scholar, her ability to so fully recognize and compassionately document the form and meaning of these women's lives is a tribute to the integrity of her methods."
—Professor Ernest Drucker, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx NY in Addiction

From the Publisher