New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

About New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Publisher

New Books Network

Category

arts · history · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

27 Mar 2009

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 498 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   Immoral Traffic An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India with Vibhuti Ramachandran (Cambridge UP, 2025)

   Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism. Vibhuti Ramachandran is an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia. She serves as an Associate Professor at University of California-Irvine's Department of Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences. Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). Her dissertation focuses on the history of policing and punishment in colonial North India.

2. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory with Heather Berg (Duke UP, 2026)

   “If whores were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” (ix). Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Duke UP, 2026) opens with a quote from Clara expanding on the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement. Interweaving interviews and writing by sex workers like Clara, Notes from the Sex Worker Left by Heather Berg offers a political theory that critiques family/couple-form, work, and state, envisioning militant community care. Rejecting the pressure to fit into a category of hardworking, respectable workers dominant even in the Left, Heather Berg extends Marxist theorization of lumpenproletariat: the working-class “who were criminalized, itinerant, and otherwise making a living of ‘dubious means’ ” (13). Although lumpenproletariat is not a cohesive category, with sex workers offering different perspectives and experiences, Berg reads lumpenness as a “critical standpoint” (14) to reimagine the world where we are able to not only survive, but also thrive, collectively. Through theorizing, the book invites the readers to think with sex workers on the question of how we can thrive in this increasingly precarious world. This book is a thought-provoking and beautiful read for anyone who is interested in exploring these questions together at the intersections of gender studies, labor studies, and political theory. Beyond academia, anyone who wants to delve deeper into the couple-form, work, and state structure, dreaming of escape and alternatives, would find this to be a rewarding read.

3. 

   28 Aug 2026

   Elizabeth J. Letourneau and Luke Malone, "One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis—And What We Can Do to Stop It" (Basic Books, 2026)

   One in five children will be sexually abused before their eighteenth birthday. This isn't a problem confined to a single country, city, or neighborhood. It's something that happens everywhere, and what it costs can be enormous: depression, PTSD, and elevated long-term risk for physical illness, including heart disease and cancer. In One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis—And What We Can Do to Stop It (Basic Books, 2026), Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone make the case that child sexual abuse is not inevitable. It is preventable, and at this moment in time, we have the tools to stop it before it begins. Letourneau and Malone don't stop at describing the problem. The book creates a clear picture of how much of the harm is caused by other children. They lay out a road map, built on years of research and real compassion, for keeping kids safe and reaching young people at risk of causing harm before anyone gets hurt. In this episode of the New Books Network, we follow that road map and ask what changes when prevention rather than punishment becomes the organizing idea behind child safety. The conversation is energized and respectful of survivors and their families, and it projects an urgency that does not lose hope. I hope you find it worth your time. I think you will, if you are interested in what child sexual abuse prevention can look like in 2026. - Aniss Benelmouffok Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inside a recent episode

Scott Cunningham, "Causal Inference: The Mixtape" (Yale UP, 2021)

Published 19 Nov 2021 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Well, That's great, and that's always true. But the problem is that in a lot of the social sciences, political science, economics in particular, epidemiology, and even in some of the physical sciences, astronomy, you can't really run a lot of physically randomized experiments. We don't randomly assign people into college itself. We don't randomly assign countries to into different kinds of political regimes. They tend to be happening, but they happen, but we're not randomly doing it. And yet they're very, very important. They're extremely, extremely important questions to know what is the effect of college on earnings and what is the effect of some sort of political regime or some sort of public policy. […]

Who has been a guest on New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Ayo Wahlberg
• Hannah Charnock
• Chris Washington
• Sarah Bull
• Lieba Faier

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

243

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.8 / 5

6 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 67 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

72

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

85

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

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