Trading sex for freedom: The influence of Kamala Kempadoo's early scholarship

Abstract

This article revisits Kamala Kempadoo's publications on sex work in the Caribbean in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This period marks both the era before the framework of anti-trafficking consumed the field of sex work studies and the era when Black feminist ethnographic research on how race, class, and structural violence affected women's lives globally was making an impact across disciplines. By focusing on three key concepts (work, race and gender, and slavery), I show how Kempadoo recontextualized terms used by anti-prostitution feminists within the history of colonialism and the political economy of 1990s multilateral trade. In so doing, she offered feminist sociologists and anthropologists new possibilities for understanding sexual labor and sexual freedom. The paper then returns to Kempadoo's engagement with the history of enslaved Black women in Caribbean brothels to offer an alternative reading of the relationships between slavery and sex work that now dominate the public relations campaigns of anti-trafficking organizations. Taken together, Kempadoo's multidisciplinary contributions help feminist anthropology see how important global sex worker activism is to understanding race, gender, and work. This paper further demonstrates how combining critical engagement with feminist ethnographies with historical memory studies can shed new light on contemporary social issues.