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.

中文翻译：

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爱的劳动：全球化城市中的性、工作和母爱

虽然女权主义学术一直致力于扩展将性工作作为再生产劳动的理论，但很少有学者详细阐述性工作者作为母亲在照顾工作中的作用。本文通过对班加罗尔 52 名顺性别女性性工作者的采访来论证，对她们而言，在经济不稳定的情况下，性工作是成为一名好母亲的核心，同时对母亲为孩子提供中等收入的要求也越来越高。 - 类消费品。追踪受访者通过性工作的路径揭示了性工作者如何在家庭中提供必要的社会和经济资源，而性工作使他们能够获得其他谋生可能性可能会排除的受人尊敬的女性气质。这些导航，对于这些性工作者，打破男权保护的父权理想以及新自由主义向上流动的承诺。此外，他们的叙述有助于使性工作者再生产劳动的叙述复杂化，展示了他们如何驾驭多种性别经济安排，以开辟自主、尊严和自豪的空间。