Dr. Kimberly Walters
I research sexuality and gender in contemporary South India. I am particularly interested in competing modes of transnational humanitarianism as they interact with marginalized sexual practices. My training is as a psychological anthropologist, and I received my doctorate in 2015 at the University of Chicago from the Department of Comparative Human Development. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the University of Chicago, Delhi Center.
My research appears in the journals Signs, Anthropological Quarterly, Economic & Political Weekly, and AIDS Care. I also contribute to the online journal, openDemocracy.
My first book project, Rescued from Rights: Sex Work and Anti-Trafficking in South India, traces the complex ways that Telugu-speaking sex workers in South India engaged with transnationally funded interventions seeking to change them. At the height of the HIV pandemic, Indian sex workers were the focus of intensive development programs meant to empower them with rights as a strategy to destigmatize paid sex and slow the spread of the virus. The empowerment approach drew on feminist thought arguing that selling sex is labor and should not be exceptionalized within capitalism. In the last decade, HIV prevention programs in India have given way to the rise of anti-trafficking discourse framing paid sex as inherently harmful to women. The rapid rise in global funding for rescue work in South Asia has led to an industry of agencies that effectively incarcerate cisgender female sex workers against their will in the name of rescuing them with donations gleaned largely from Christians and international feminist organizations in the global north. My sex worker interlocutors in South India, for their part, fought being rescued from what ant-traffickers termed “modern slavery” and rejected pressure to quit selling sex. But many of these same women chose to collaborate with anti-traffickers in portraying themselves as victims of trafficking for donors and the news media. Rescued from Rights puzzles out why women who are objectively harmed by the raid and rescue regime in India also balked at speaking about paid sex in terms of rights and empowerment. Ultimately, the book argues for the centrality of moral community in understanding Indian sex workers’ strategic rejection and collaboration with globally circulating discourses about their lives.
