Based on three years of ethnographic work in New York City, this book provides the first detailed account of the economic lives of women drug users. Set in a neighborhood plagued with AIDS, Sexed Work reveals the economic lives of a group of women whose options have been severely circumscribed, not only by drug use, but also by poverty, racism, violence, and enduring marginality. Maher draws extensively on the women's own words to describe how structures and relations of gender, race and class are articulated by divisions of labor in the street-level drug economy. This rich, nuanced and...