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In locations around the world, sex tourism is a booming business. What's Love Got to Do with It? is an in-depth examination of the motivations of workers, clients, and others connected to the sex tourism business in Sosúa, a town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Denise Brennan considers why Dominican and Haitian women move to Sosúa to pursue sex work and describes how sex tourists, primarily Europeans, come to Sosúa to buy sex cheaply and live out racialized fantasies. For the sex workers, Brennan explains, the sex trade is more than a means of survival—it is an advancement strategy that hinges on their successful “performance” of love. Many of these women seek to turn a commercialized sexual transaction into a long-term relationship that could lead to marriage, migration, and a way out of poverty.

Illuminating the complex world of Sosúa’s sex business in rich detail, Brennan draws on extensive interviews not only with sex workers and clients, but also with others who facilitate and benefit from the sex trade. She weaves these voices into an analysis of Dominican economic and migration histories to consider the opportunities—or lack thereof—available to poor Dominican women. She shows how these women, local actors caught in a web of global economic relations, try to take advantage of the foreign men who are in Sosúa to take advantage of them. Through her detailed study of the lives and working conditions of the women in Sosúa’s sex trade, Brennan raises important questions about women’s power, control, and opportunities in a globalized economy.

Breaking new ground in the understanding of sexuality's complex relationship to colonialism, When Sex Threatened the State illuminates the attempts at regulating prostitution in colonial Nigeria.
 
As Saheed Aderinto shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's "civilizing mission". He details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, he reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike.
 
The first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, When Sex Threatened the State combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.

During the early twentieth century, individuals and organizations from across the political spectrum launched a sustained effort to eradicate forced prostitution, commonly known as "white slavery." White Slave Crusades is the first comparative study to focus on how these anti-vice campaigns also resulted in the creation of a racial hierarchy in the United States. 
 
Focusing on the intersection of race, gender, and sex in the antiprostitution campaigns, Brian Donovan analyzes the reactions of native-born whites to new immigrant groups in Chicago, to African Americans in New York City, and to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Donovan shows how reformers employed white slavery narratives of sexual danger to clarify the boundaries of racial categories, allowing native-born whites to speak of a collective "us" as opposed to a "them."  These stories about forced prostitution provided an emotionally powerful justification for segregation, as well as other forms of racial and sexual boundary maintenance in urban America. 
 

With Respect to Sex is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India—individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane.

Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Gayatri Reddy sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships among local and global, sexual and moral, economies.

This book will be regarded as the definitive work on hijras, one that will be of enormous interest to anthropologists, students of South Asian culture, and specialists in the study of gender and sexuality.

"When I was growing up, my mother wanted me to grow up and meet a nice guy, marry him and have babies and be happy."

These are the words with which Margaret, a thirty-three-year-old cocaine-using prostitute, begins her story. In this book, she and four other women, all inner-city hustlers, describe their lives, how they came to be where they are, and where they hope to go.

Margaret, Charlie, Virginia, Tracy, and Laquita are all drug users who are involved in regular criminal activity: prostitution, burglary, shoplifting, robbery, drug selling, petty theft, and  various kinds of fraud. Four of the women are black; one is white and Puerto  Rican. While all five have been involved in same-sex relationships, three are primarily straight and two are primarily lesbian. They come from working-class or welfare families; some women characterize their mothers as strict, abusive, intolerant, and distant while other mothers are characterized as being concerned, religious, and loving. The women talk frankly about their drug use, their sexual and criminal activities, their childhoods, their personal relationships with their families of origin, children, partners, their fears and future goals, and the ordinary trappings of their lives.

While these accounts describe lives lived at the margins of society, they also reveal women who practice self-evaluation. These are women who have a deep understanding of individual accountability and responsibility. These accounts are connected by themes of violence and poverty, but they are also connected by the variety and richness of these women's lives. The women also assert a control over their activities and talk of independent judgment in terms that we imagine are reserved for men. There is a tendency in criminology to treat the data generated by research on men as fundamentally true for women as well. By allowing female law-breakers to describe their lives in their own way, Pettiway underlines not only their differences from men but also their differences from each other.

However, their stories also reveal their common humanity and their profound will to survive despite all obstacles. These women manage to live self-defined and self-validated lives in a world even more turbulent than that of their mainstream sisters. They share a web of experiences created out of race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, drug use, and urbanization that provides them with meaning and courage. They speak movingly about guilt and responsibility, about rape and intimacy, and about ambition and despair. Through their stories we can grasp the  traumas and turning points that lead us all to make bad decisions as well as those ideals and inspirations that can help to redeem us.