Laura Agustin

Dr. Laura Agustín is an authority on undocumented migration, sex work, trafficking and feminist scrapping on these. Her book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry shows how prostitution has been isolated as a feminist debate and how moral crusaders against sex trafficking use neocolonialist ideas of deviance and crime to repress migration, infantilise women and make themselves important, necessary figures. Agustín’s early academic articles described the glaring absence of migrants who sell sex from migration literature and the strange exclusion of sexual labour from concepts of the service sector. As a remedy to exclusions she proposed the cultural study of commercial sex. Her concept of the Rescue Industry turns the gaze towards middle-class presumptions of Knowing Best how everyone should live and work. As The Naked Anthropologist she has spoken widely, sometimes as the only voice questioning current migration and labour policy in a sea of moral panic.  A lifetime migrant, she blogs regularly at http://www.lauraagustin.com.