Precarious Empowerment

Precarious Empowerment: Sexual Labor in the Coffee Shops of Chile’s Santiago provides a textured and telling exploration into the lives and experiences of sex workers in Chile, their encounters with discrimination and economic precarity, and their empowered resistance.

Set in and around ‘tinted cafes’—spaces hidden from public view where women dance for their male clients and perform sexual services—within Chile’s capital city of Santiago, author Pilar Ortiz traces connections between sex work in the present day and the lasting legacies of colonialism and gender and sexual norms. Drawing on her careful ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with the workers and their clients, the book reveals the many challenges women face at the intersection of class, racial, and gender inequalities. It also documents their resistance to stigma and stifling social norms and predetermined gender roles. In their practice of sexual labor, the book argues that women display a considerable degree of agency, mobility, and empowerment. Within this contentious space, the author explores how sex workers negotiate inequalities and exclusion and how they are poised to do so in a rapidly changing political and social climate.

Exploring experiences of exploitation and resistance within Chile, this book speaks to the much larger question of agency versus oppression in conversations about sexual labor worldwide. Its compelling analysis will captivate those interested in scholarly studies of sexual labor and the ways it is performed and shaped across hierarchies of race, class, and gender.