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A "Perversion" of Choice

Sex Work Offers Just Enough in Chicago's Urban Ghetto

Harvard University

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Columbia University

In an apartment building on Chicago's Southside, fifty of the seventy-five residents are sex workers. Our study uses in-depth interviews and participant observation of Chicago's sex work economy to argue that sex work is one constituent part of an overall low-wage, off-the-books economy of resource exchange among individuals in a bounded geographic setting. To an outsider, the decision to be a sex worker seems irrational; in this article we argue that specific localized conditions invert this decision and render it entirely rational. For the men and women in our study, sex work acts as a short-term solution that "satisfices" the demands of persistent poverty and instability, and it provides a meaningful option in the quest for a job that provides autonomy and personal fulfillment.

Key Words: sex work • prostitution • informal economy • low-wage labor • ethnography

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 37, No. 4, 417-441 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241607309879


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