The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States

A. Agathangelou

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780312294663
• eBook ISBN: 9781403981486
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

At the intersection of the warmth of hearth and home and the dangers of the street lies the tenuous position of women engaged in reproductive labour, those involved in the sex trade and those in domestic positions. These are women who are vulnerable, exploited, and whose dirty work allows for the reproduction of traditional social mores and roles. Yet while they are used to sustain tradition, dialectically they reflect the hyperconnections of globalization through the migration of women, the development of placement 'agencies' that often are little but fronts for transnational crime; and the transfer of money from the developed countries to the oppressed world. This book focuses on the interaction of the global and the local through a close investigation of the political economy of desire and reproduction in three states that blur the line between developed and developing: Greece; Turkey; and Cyprus. These are countries at the crossroads, in flux, whose peripheral siting at the centre of global capitalism provides unusual insight into the dark recesses of patriarchy, paternalism and exploitation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Sex and Domestic Work in the Periphery: Fenced-Off Economies of Desire
• 2 Peripheral Economies Working and Playing Hard: Social Reproduction and Racial and Sexual Desire in the Mediterranean
• 3 Reproductive Labor: Sex and Domestic Work in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey
• 4 Desiring Power in the European Union: Peripheral Economic States’ Participation in Capital Accumulation
• 5 National Desires for Security
• 6 A Global Political Economy of Sex: Feminist Possibilities for Transborder Democracy and Safety
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index