Lydia's Open Door

by Kelly, Patty

• ISBN13: 9780520255364
• ISBN10: 0520255364
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-04-14
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

In this groundbreaking ethnographic study, Patty Kelly examines the lives of the women who work in the Zona Galactica, a state-run brothel in Chiapas's capital city. By delving into lives that would otherwise go unremarked, this book documents the modernization of the sex industry during the neoliberal era in the city of Tuxtla Gutieacute;rrez and illustrates how state-regulated sex became part of a broader effort by government officials to bring modernity to Chiapas, one of Mexico's poorest and most conflicted states. Kelly's innovative approach, which dispassionately locates prostitution in a political-economic context by treating it as work, shows how freedom and anxiety and the market and morality coexist in the business of sex. She provides both the view from above-of politicians, bureaucrats, city workers, campesinos, and an anthropologist interacting within the world of sexual commerce-and the view from below-of sex workers and their clients. But most valuably she conveys her analysis through vivid portraits of the lives of the sex workers themselves and shows that the women involved are neither victims nor heroines but something else: actors caught between agency and constraint.

Author Biography

Patty Kelly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Map of Chiapas	p. xxiii
Introduction	p. 1
Modern Sex in a Modern City	p. 32
Hidden in Plain Sight: Street Prostitution	p. 53
Inside the Galactic Zone: Regulating Sex, Regulating Women	p. 76
Convergence: Panistas, Prostitutes, and Peasants	p. 102
"It Began Innocently": Women of the Ambiente	p. 121
Sellers and Buyers	p. 151
The Secrets We Keep: Sex, Work, Stigma	p. 183
Final Thoughts: Understanding, Imagining	p. 204
Epilogue	p. 214
Notes	p. 221
Bibliography	p. 239
Index	p. 255
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