Customer Reviews

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

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What a relief to have a different conversation about sex and economics outside of the usual morality/rescue mentality. My first reaction to reading the book was to want to meet the author, talk to her all day, and then take her on tour to discuss it with everyone else.

This is the wave of the future, when it comes to discussing "prositution," which already seems like quaint terminology. If you're someone who's interested in progressive sexual politics and how the world works, you are going to EAT THIS UP.

The author does write like a scientific observer, an academic. I appreciated her style and perspective. I would almost say it's not beach reading but actually I read it lying under a mosquito net under one of the most beautiful beachside locations in California. Everyone kept passing me food and tabloid gossip magazines, and I refused them until I got to the last page.

This book is an excellent antidote to all the fantasies about rescue that the high-minded indulge in when they want to save sex workers from their allegedly miserable fate. There are many complex reasons why people - and it's not just women, as Agustin reminds us - perform sexual acts for money, and it would be a good idea for their self-nominated saviors to listen. And there are many complex reasons why people patronize sex workers - it's not just "exploitation," as sex-work abolitionists believe.

Oh and it illuminates the weird affinity between some "fundamentalist feminists" and the religious right, not an attractive alliance.

Though the book is mostly about sex workers who travel from their homelands to ply their trade, the book also helps us think about the whole issue of migration, and our contemporary paranoia about immigrants. The whole notion of "migrants" is deeply class biased; no one ever called an Indian bond trader working in New York a migrant. But he or she has travelled for the same reasons as dishwashers, nannies, and strippers - to make money, for sure, but also to see the world, or escape suffocating origins.

The writer gives us a new perspective of sex work and migration i.e. trafficking; one that questions the "victim" status commonly given to prostitutes and those who leave their home country for work abroad. A very good read, it will be lent out so much I'll want to buy a second copy.

I applaud Professor Agustin's book - it's about time that a book about sex work actually listens to what sex workers have to say! There is this constant drumbeat of "rescue" propaganda, that presents cisgendered female sex workers as "fallen women" who need to be "saved" from their jobs by upper class ladies (and totally ignores the existence of cisgendered male and transgendered sex workers). Professor Agustin totally breaks with that, lets the voice of sex workers enter the room and challenges the respectable affluent ladies, the cops and the bible thumpers and their reactionary anti sex worker agenda. She also exposes the subtle racism and xenophobia that lies behind many of these "anti human trafficking" campaigns.

Professor Agustin's book is actually very readable for an academic tome and I applaud her for that also.

So, if you want to know the real deal about sex work and "human trafficking" you need to buy Professor Agustin's book "Sex At The Margins".

Not sure if this book is groundbreaking but it certainly is a unique and well documented look at women who migrate to become sex workers. Laura Augustin has a Ph.D. and a refreshing attitude toward what has become called "trafficking" but which she shows is often the best choice a woman in the global South has of supporting herself and her family. She really goes after the canard that all migrating sex workers are controlled by vicious pimps and that none of them are economic migrants looking for a better life.

Augustin does a great job in punching through the thick accretion of myth that has built up around the subject through a combination of ethnographic interviews and reviews of literature. Her discussion of the "rescue industry" is devastating, showing that much of its statistical basis is either created from whole cloth or interpolated from inadequate or biased samples.

This is social science with a very welcome edge.