Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labor

The primary focus of the book is to illuminate intersections of gender, sexuality, work, race and economic relations in the Caribbean. A central focus is on the social construction of prostitution and other types of transactional sexual relations that many women, and increasingly more young men, are engaged in. Sex tourism, migrant sex work, HIV/AIDS, and legalized prostitution are topics that are examined alongside sex workers agency, resistance and organization. This book challenges conceptions of prostitution as, exclusively, a form of violence to women, and argues that sexual-economic relations can be sites of both oppression and liberation. It sheds light on aspects of women's lives and of the Caribbean that are widely know to exist, but which have not been documented or analyzed in any extent in social studies.