"A provocative collection of essays on prostitution, by scholars, journalists, and sex workers, with a focus on developing countries along with two essays on Japan.... While the authors strongly condemn forced labor, they contend that law enforcement should address the question of coercion, not sexual activity itself."

-- Foreign Affairs

"Few works have presented as well-rounded a view of prostitution as this volume."

-- Library Journal

"Frankly, I expected this book to be depressing, if informative; it turned out to be exhilarating and educational. The international group of scholars, activists, and sex workers whose voices Kempadoo and Doezema have brought together shows us women as victims and agents of resistance, colonized bodies and defiant minds, rejecting all received clichés about prostitution, whether the source of the cliché be academic, imperial, or (even) feminist."

-- Lillian S. Robinson, co-author Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle

"Global Sex Workers is an important new work on the changing global politics of sex work that will shake up anyone used to thinking of women sex workers solely as victims."

-- Elaine Bernard, Executive Director of the Harvard University Trade Union Program

"Global Sex Workers will expand the understanding of every reader who is willing to let sex workers and their advocates speak for themselves. This is an enormously powerful book which will shake up the global systems of discourse, sourced in Neo-Victorian moralism, which operate out of touch with, and at the expense of, sex workers real lives."

-- Carol Queen, author of Real Live Nude Girls: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture

Routledge Web Site, May, 2000

With the growing international phenomena of sex tourism, sexual slavery, human trafficking, child prostitution and AIDS, one thing has become clear: the global village has a brothel. Global Sex Workers combines scholarly essays with personal narratives, interviews and reports, presenting the perspectives of sex workers from Asia, Australia, the Americas, the Caribbean, West and South Africa and Western Europe.

This collection testifies to the diversity of activities and meanings of sex work, both culturally specific and transnational in scope, as workers go about their daily lives. It documents national and international sex workers' movements that organize for legal and human rights, struggling to resist marginalization and exploitive working conditions around the world.