Kamala Kempadoo's influence on sexual economies scholarship in South Asia and Latin America

Abstract In this article we outline Kamala Kempadoo's influence on research on sex work, transactional sex, and sexual economies in South Asia and Latin America, focusing on Brazil and India, the authors’ respective areas of expertise. We draw on our own research arcs to show how Kempadoo's work enabled generations of ethnographic and ethnographically informed research on sexual commerce that centered questions of labor and critiques of policing and impoverishment. Kempadoo's work offered both an exemplar and episteme for research on sex work that mobilized anti‐teleological critiques of the “Third World Other,” while showing that a structural analysis of class and capital could critique the harms of the anti‐trafficking framework. Kempadoo's influence is apparent in work that uses ethnography to center the lens of labor in arguing against reductive accounts of transacted sexual services. We show that Kempadoo's work is more relevant than ever, considering state‐sponsored violence against migrants and the need for re/producing ethnographically situated accounts of the ways in which sexual commerce operates in navigating precarity.