This multisited ethnography is not about sex work or sex trafficking, or even about anti-trafficking campaigns alone. Instead, as an anthropologist of law, NGOs, and the Indian state, the author situates the governance of prostitution in the broader Indian sociolegal and global humanitarian contexts. The book illuminates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns come together to govern prostitution, combining humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality. It explores the consequences of US-funded anti-trafficking campaigns operating alongside India’s existing legal framework against prostitution, and highlights the significant role NGOs play in suturing and implementing both kinds of interventions. At the same time, the book tracks how women removed from the sex trade – some of whom were trafficked and others voluntary sex workers – navigate these overlapping interventions. The title Immoral Traffic comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement their anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic takes the reader along the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.

This chapter argues that scholars of sex, sexuality, and gender have begun to engage with global histories, but in a selective manner and often characterised by ideas of one-way dissemination from Europe to locations beyond its borders. It suggests some entry points for a richer, multidirectional historiography, including the movements of indigenous and colonised peoples, economies of trading sex, the regulation of reproduction, and new histories of feminisms. Non-binary forms of gender and queer sexualities are prominent within such literatures and help to complicate established narratives. The chapter also highlights historiographical contributions that diversify our histories away from ‘great power’ geopolitics and draw out the specificity of regions such as eastern and central Europe and the experiences of ‘non-aligned’ states and of non-state actors such as religious organizations and racialized historical actors.

The concluding chapter reflects on the everyday lives of sex workers, police officers and public health officials in China under Xi Jinping, and considers policy implications of the book’s findings.

This chapter is about how police officers in China enforce anti-prostitution laws. These regulations outlaw the exchange of sex for money or other material goods in all of its forms, and for all individuals who engage in it. Yet in practice, police enforcement primarily targets low-tier sex workers. Of the array of possible sanctions, these women are more likely incarcerated than fined, and they are placed in institutions with a rehabilitative mission that, in practice, is not met. In addition, law enforcement officials often engage in illegal and abusive practices when arresting sex workers. Clients are not completely immune from punishment, but they are less likely to be arrested than are the women they solicit. The major exception to that pattern involves high-profile men whose actions have crossed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their cases are taken out of the hands of street-level police officers and into the world of elite politics, with prostitution charges used to help secure their downfall.

This chapter is about second wives and mistresses, who form the highest tier of sex work in China. These women live in a world of simultaneous precariousness and power. Their precariousness comes from their total dependence on one man. Unlike women in the lower tiers of the sex industry who solicit on the streets, in brothels, or in entertainment venues, for second wives, finding another client can be a complicated, drawn-out process. Their vulnerability also comes from the state of limbo inherent in a mistress arrangement. They know the relationship is temporary, and while they often yearn for marriage, as kept women they cannot take steps toward that goal. Their power, meanwhile, comes from the emotional dependence their clients sometimes have on them: smitten men will go to great lengths to keep their second wives happy and shower them with countless gifts to do so. It also comes from the knowledge that second wives sometimes gain of their client’s business activities, which provides these women with tools that can be used to help orchestrate his professional downfall when a relationship sours. This combination of vulnerability and strength presents a picture of second wives that belies their harsh reception in Chinese public opinion.

What does Chinese law have to say about people who are involved in sex work and the places where it occurs? Prostitution control is a universal problem for which states have adopted a variety of policies to address the public order, public health, and commercial challenges that it presents. This chapter describes that range of regulatory possibilities. It then explains the official choices that China has made, through discussions of the policing, health, and taxation rules and institutions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted to regulate prostitution.

This chapter is about the influence of transnational actors on China’s sex worker health policies. While the policing of prostitution in China is a story of domestic law and politics, the public health approach to regulating sex work in China starts in the international global health community. It then makes its way into central government health institutions in Beijing, and trickles down into the lives of local state health workers and the sex workers in their community. These transnational roots matter: they have shaped both the content of sex work health policies and the public health officials who manage their administration. Indeed, the approach that China’s health policies and officials endorse for gauging the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and reducing its occurrence among sex workers, and the language these authorities use, reflect best practices in the global public health community. Yet the obstacles that Chinese health agents encounter result in practices that fall short of these ideals and harm sex workers. That often grim reality is the subject of the next chapter. What I highlight in this chapter is how the global public health community working in China to support the creation of HIV/AIDS policies seems disengaged from what actually happens on the ground.

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.

This chapter introduces the regulation of prostitution in China as a case study of law in everyday life. It presents China’s three tiers of sex workers, the state’s interests in the sex industry, and patterns of prostitution policy implementation. It shows how the study of prostitution and its regulation in China expands our understanding of state–society relations, and of sex work and its regulation across space and time.

This chapter is about the perspectives and experiences that female sex workers in China share across tiers of prostitution. The daily lives of low-tier sex workers, hostesses, and second wives in China differ from each other in important ways. Yet despite relatively fixed boundaries between tiers of prostitution, these women do not exist in unrelated, independent silos. After all, their source of income comes from the same activity: exchanging sex for money or other material goods. The chapter first highlights how movement across tiers of sex work is limited, and how low-tier sex workers and hostesses express a preference for the work conditions in their own tier, rather than voice a desire to move up in the pecking order. It then examines narratives that these women have in common across all three tiers. Lastly, it discusses how sex workers who cross paths with grassroots organizations develop a shared consciousness of their membership in a global community of sex work civil society, and appropriate its language and symbols in their own lives.

This chapter is about low-tier prostitution. In China, selling sex in the lowest tier of prostitution is both difficult and dangerous. Women who do so solicit either on the streets or in small brothels located in apartments or in businesses that masquerade as hair salons or massage parlors. In all of these spaces, work conditions are grueling and take their toll on sex workers’ health. The threat of violence and even death at the hands of clients, madams, and pimps looms large. The beliefs and attitudes of women who sell sex on the streets and in brothels reflect these challenging experiences. Women in this tier are critical of prostitution and of themselves for engaging in it, and oppose proposals to legalize it. They also view the state with suspicion and do not feel comfortable seeking assistance from the police when doing so would reveal that they engage in prostitution. Within Chinese society, the lives of low-tier sex workers elicit both disgust and pity.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter is about middle-tier prostitution. The life of a hostess is exhausting. In addition to selling sex, women in this tier of the sex industry spend hours every evening engaging in their other professional responsibilities, which include drinking, dancing, and singing with clients. They face intense competition from their peers. Their work environment exposes them to health risks not only from HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, but also from the alcohol and tobacco they consume as part of their work. Although these conditions are taxing, they also provide middle-tier sex workers with more agency than their colleagues who work on the streets or in brothels, and lead to these women having more positive perspectives on prostitution than do their lower-tier colleagues. Hostesses tend to be assertive and reject any portrayal of their engagement in the sex industry as a story of victimhood. They also exhibit more trust in government institutions, an attitude that on rare occasions can even lead them to make public demands of the state. This work environment, autonomy and initiative contribute to public perceptions that tend to criticize hostesses as lazy and dishonorable.

This chapter is about the local health officials who implement China’s surveillance and behavioral outreach health policies for estimating the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and reducing its occurrence among sex workers. These policies set out clear guidelines for targeting certain types and numbers of sex workers for HIV/AIDS testing and outreach, with the goal of obtaining accurate knowledge of the overall sex worker population and reaching out to the individuals who present the greatest concerns to public health. These policies are also designed to protect the individual rights of sex workers, a prerequisite for obtaining higher quality data and increasing the likelihood that public health interventions will yield safer sexual behaviors. Yet frontline health workers often deviate from these rules, as obstacles within China’s health bureaucracy complicate proper policy implementation. Local health officials must also contend with two powerful entities that are predisposed to oppose their work: the sex industry and the police. Taken together, these challenges lead health agents to focus their testing and outreach efforts on hostesses instead of low-tier sex workers – even though women in the low tier are most in need of health interventions – and result in other irregularities in policy implementation with grave public health consequences.

Human trafficking is a juridical concept invented in the nineteenth century that reappeared in the late twentieth century. The concept was created amid discussions about policing of national borders and reflected panics concerning the ideal of feminine purity, when women were seen in the discourse of the time as needing protection. In this chapter we will show how discourse in support of combating human trafficking for sexual exploitation has used ideas about gender and raciality to justify policies to contain migration. The twentieth century was marked by conquests of women”s rights, and white women are no longer seen as being in need of protection as were those of the nineteenth century. However, attributes that are both accusatory and victimizing still weigh on non-white women, especially when they are involved in sex work across national borders. In these terms, there is no space for women understood as victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation to be able to affirm their labour demands based on their own understandings about what constitutes sex work, violence, and exploitation.

The history of the print media”s engagement with sexuality is a topic of enormous complexity. Depictions of sexuality in the periodical press are shaped by cultural attitudes and beliefs, representational and reporting practices, political economies, and audiences across time and space. The print media have been richly social since their inception, and all but the most rigorously controlled media systems have covered topics of a sexual nature. Sexuality has been represented as an object of social regulation, a topic of prurient interest, a problem to be solved, regulated, or eradicated, a form of commerce, and even a patriotic or religious duty. The press has played a major role in the modern project of demarcating normal sex and sexual subjects from deviant practices and identities. It has fomented moral panics around sexuality and helped liberalize sexual norms, sometimes simultaneously. The commercial, advertising-driven press developed in tandem with the sexual content it contained, and has long been a vehicle for racialized narratives of rape, imperiled femininity, and vice, adultery, and divorce. Through advertisements, classifieds, and specialized content in “obscene” journals, print media have, in some contexts, advertised sexual services and even brought people together for various types of sex.

This chapter explores race and sexuality in three parts. After a preamble that explores uses and definitions of race both historically and by historians, the first part examines representations of race and sexuality in relation to the politics of race and sexuality, via such historical figures as Sarah Baartman, Josephine Baker, and Jane Nardal. The second part considers administrative and legal policies as well as forms of social control that were used to control sexuality along the colour line, with references to Cleopatra, legal codes such as the Code Noir, the Scottsboro affair, sex work, and sex talk in the Americas, West Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The third part considers a newer trend towards exploring the influences of love, family, community, and kinship networks upon discussions and experiences of sexuality and race, via examples such as the Signares of Senegal or the ballroom houses of Harlem. One of the points of this chapter is to show how histories of empires, and those of encounters between the Global North and the Global South, were also histories of sex and race.

Sex in nineteenth-century Cairo played out on a stage of relentless change and adaptation. The city’s urban life witnessed a significant rise in population growth, transformations in family and household structures, the rise of an Egyptian nationalist elite, and the gradual demise of African and Circassian slavery. Because of the divergent approaches taken with this topic, this chapter focuses on the unequal power relations that shaped Cairene sex, using canonical texts and archival documents to tease out the connections between sex and family life, nationalism, slavery, the justice system, and sex work. Specifically emphasized are stories and narratives written by literate Egyptians and Europeans, and how their ideas of domesticity, freedom, and political authority operated in relation to sexual practices. In doing so an explanation of sex in nineteenth-century Cairo is put forward that highlights celebrated and forgotten sources, prioritizing key works that inform our current understandings of sex. The chapter discusses memoirs and political treatises written by prominent Egyptian nationalists, explores the rich possibilities raised by archival records and their differences from European traveller accounts, and concludes with what nineteenth-century sources can (and cannot) tell us about queer ideas of sex.

This chapter provides a thematic overview of commercial sex across time and space. Each section seeks to identify continuities and shifts in the way people debated, policed, and practiced commercial sex. While the analysis focuses primarily on the modern period, the chapter starts in antiquity to discuss the gendered and hierarchical notions that different societies and groups have used to refer to the ‘flesh trade’. A second section deals with the regimes and actors that have sought to control, repress, regulate, or decriminalise/normalise the sale of sex at the local, national, and international levels. Where possible, the voices of women and men who traded physical sex for money or other benefits are included in the analysis. The bottom-up approach is further developed in sections three and four, which focus on the structure and working conditions of the sex trade and profile the sellers of sex, intermediaries, and clients. A concluding section reflects on stigma, an issue that seems to have remained constant in the long history of (female) prostitution, and on coercion and consent, concepts that can be regarded as typically modern.