Laura María Agustín

I write about people who travel and cross borders to work - lots of them without permission or with fake papers. Women who work as live-in maids or sell sex, men who wash dishes, pick fruit or sell sex. Border-crossers, undocumented migrants, folks who have paid smugglers to get somewhere new. In the media this is usually positioned as hideous trafficking, and all jobs in the sex industry as a fate worse than death. It's true, some women would rather die than be a sex worker, but guess what? Others would rather die than be a maid. In my writing I don't generalise. You need a whole lot of information before it's okay to stick labels on people. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry lay the non-victimising groundwork in 2007 and continues to be unique. I wish the publisher did not set the price so high. My website is The Naked Anthropologist at www.lauraagustin.com. Write me. Or follow and discuss on Twitter @LauraAgustin and Facebook lauramariaagustin