"Maher does a superior job of challenging current conceptions of women's position and behavior in the street-level
drug economy....an excellent examination of an often misunderstood and overlooked group and is informative for
people from many disciplines."
--Choice
Oxford University Press Web Site, April, 2001
Summary
Based on three years of ethnographic work in New York City, this book provides the first detailed account of
the economic lives of women drug users. Set in a neighborhood plagued with AIDS, Sexed Work reveals the economic
lives of a group of women whose options have been severely circumscribed, not only by drug use, but also by poverty,
racism, violence, and enduring marginality. Maher draws extensively on the women's own words to describe how structures
and relations of gender, race and class are articulated by divisions of labor in the street-level drug economy.
This rich, nuanced and theoretically sophisticated study of "crime as work" will be compelling reading
for all those interested in the way in which women deal with the intersection of gender, race, and work.
Table of Contents
1. Readings of Victimization and Volition
2. Taking it on the Street
3. Gender, Work, and Informalization
4. A Reserve Army: Women and the Drug Market
5. Jobs for the Boyz: Street Hustles
6. A Hard Road to Home: Sexwork
7. Intersectionalities: Gender, Race and Class
8. The Reproduction of Inequalities
Appendix: On Reflexivity, Reciprocity, and Ethnographic Research
