Temporarily Yours – Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex (Worlds of Desire (CHUP)) - Hardcover

Bernstein, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226044572 ISBN 13: 9780226044576

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

Despite increased economic opportunities for women, sexual commerce has not only thrived in the Western world, it has diversified along technological, spatial, and social lines. For example, contemporary sex workers often meet their clinets through the Internet, offering new kinds of encounters that are a far cry from the quick and impersonal contacts that we normally associate with prostitution. For "Temporarily Yours", sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein walked the streets and went behind closed doors, interviewing sex workers, their clients, and the government officials who regulate the business. Along the way, she discovered a significant transformation that is occurring in the urban sex trade. Many middle-class johns are now seeking to fulfill fantasies of intimacy and affection - to purchase an authentic interaction that is gratifying emotionally, not just physically. Drawing on innovative research in San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, Bernstein paints a provocative picture of the current state of global sexual commerce and its relationship to a burgeoning consumer culture.

About this title

Review:

"A fascinating combination of 'macro' analysis (i.e., the political economy of prostitution) and 'micro' insights into a certain form of sex work--i.e., the kind that occurs indoors between middle-class/upper-class men and lower-to-middle class women."--A.M Cesario and L. Chancer "Qualitative Sociology "

"This rich and multidimensional book looks at how individual practices and cultural contexts are shaped by economic structures. . . . I hope Temporarily Yours finds a wide audience among those interested in labor, emotions, gender, sexuality, urbanizm, and globalization. And public policy experts as well. Temporarily Yours is a terrific book. That it could be written and published today marks the coming of age of sociological work on sexuality and the maturation, too, of gender studies."--Arlene Stein "Culture and the Media "

"Combining bold claims about changes in the global sexual economy with deep empathy for sex workers themselves, Elizabeth Bernstein uses perceptive ethnography in San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amsterdam to illuminate contemporary change and variation in the sale of sexual services. We begin to see that in the world of commercial sex new forms of intimacy are emerging."

-- (06/12/2007)

"This is an ambitious book--highly readable, compelling, and original. Bernstein's claim is that the character and organization of sex work has shifted between the modern industrial to late-capitalist periods. Whereas the signature form of sex work used to be the non-white streetwalker working in largely marginal neighborhoods, today, she reveals, sex work is largely private, relying heavily on the Internet, and provided by someone that is as often white and middle-class as non-white and poor."

-- (09/26/2006)

"An analysis of contemporary sexual commerce that combines a sharp ethnographic eye with a trenchant theoretical mind. Whether you are a jaded prostitution scholar tired of debates that seem forever to re-chew the same contentious old cud, or someone who has never read a book on prostitution before, this wide-ranging study will both orient and challenge you."-- (06/12/2007)

"Elizabeth Bernstein's Temporarily Yours is a first-rate piece of sociological investigation that reads like a novel. We will never look at commercial sex in the same way again."--Kristin Luker, University of California, Berkeley, author of When Sex Goes to School-- (08/21/2007)

About the Author:

Elizabeth Bernstein is assistant professor of sociology at Barnard College and coeditor of Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0226044572
• ISBN 13: 9780226044576
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288