Labors of Love: Sex, Work, and Good Mothering in the Globalizing City

Abstract

While feminist scholarship has worked to expand theorizations of sex work as reproductive labor, fewer scholars elaborate on sex workers’ role in caring work as mothers. This article draws on interviews with fifty-two cisgender women sex workers in Bangalore to argue that, for them, sex work is central to being a good mother, in a context of increasing economic precarity combined with intensified demands on mothers to provide children with middle-class consumer goods. Tracing interviewees’ paths through sex work reveals how sex workers provide necessary social and economic resources within the family while sex work allows them to attain forms of respectable femininity that other livelihood possibilities might foreclose. These navigations, for these sex workers, puncture patriarchal ideals of masculine protection as well as the neoliberal promise of upward mobility. Further, their accounts help complicate accounts of sex workers’ reproductive labor, showing how they navigate multiple gendered economic arrangements to carve out spaces of autonomy, dignity, and pride.