ABSTRACT
Sex work, prostitution, sex trade, sex trafficking, and domestic work are concepts that evoke both a sense of morality and criminalization in the global context. The global trade in women, a lucrative “shadow market,” generates from 7 to 12 billion dollars annually (Hughes 2000). While these sexual relations suffuse international relations (IR) and constitute a lived experience, the field as an intellectual discipline continues to retain the (neo)realist fiction that IR is really only about competing states making rational choices independent of gender and sexual relations. Theoretical analysis of the sex trade remains underdeveloped in contemporary IR and international political economy (IPE), despite feminist critiques that have brought it to the forefront of policy and scholarly attention (Enloe 1990;
Moon 1997). What would the disciplines of IR and IPE look like if we took seriously concepts such as desire economies and sex trade?
