Care for Sale: An Ethnography of Latin American Domestic and Sex Workers
Venue
Violet Laidlaw Room, CMB and onlineDescription
In this talk Dr. Ana Gutiérrez Garza reflects on the connections and the factors that contribute to migrant women choosing either domestic or sex work, including their concerns about money and morality. In her book Care for Sale: An Ethnography of Latin American Domestic and Sex Workers in London (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dr. Gutiérrez Garza illustrates the ways in which people fashion themselves and cultivate difference, inequality, or commonality as part of their self-making projects. By doing this, the book shows migrants not only as economic actors, but also as individuals involved in an intimate process that constantly modifies their sense of morality and personhood.
In homes and brothels around the world, migrant women are selling a unique commodity: care. Care for Sale is an in-depth ethnography of a group of middle-class women from Latin America who exchange care and intimacy for money while working as domestic and sex workers in London. Illuminating the complexities of care work, the book offers a detailed study of women's lives and working conditions. It considers how their experience of migration and intimate labor is one of rupture that both enables and forces them to gradually reconstitute themselves, in their host cities, as people quite distinct from their "normal" selves back home.
This event is in person and online.