Prabha Kotiswaran

Prabha Kotiswaran is Professor of Law and Social Justice at King’s College London.

Her main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, feminist legal studies and sociology of law. Prabha has authored Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India (Princeton 2011) (winner of the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics). She has written on economic sociology of law and edited in that context, a book on trafficking (Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery, Cambridge, 2017). She co-authored Governance Feminism: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press 2018) and co-edited Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (University of Minnesota Press 2019), both with Janet Halley, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir). She has edited the Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (with Mariana Valverde, Eve-Darian Smith and Kamari Clarke).

She is currently PI of an EU supported grant, the Laws of Social Reproduction, a cross sectoral study of five sectors of reproductive labour including unpaid care and domestic work.

Laws of Social Reproduction

> 16 h 30

Feminist scholarship on reproductive labour today spans many disciplines and has expanded its focus from unpaid domestic work within the home to include various forms of paid reproductive labour. In my presentation I want to offer a cross sectoral comparison of reproductive labour across the marriage-market continuum to include unpaid domestic work, paid domestic work, surrogacy and egg donation, erotic dancing and sex work through empirical research on these forms of labour in the global South context of India. Further I show how default legal categories governing these forms of labour shape women’s bargaining power within these sectors. However these legal categories are contingent and women within these sectors have vastly different stakes in regulation. It is only by investigating background legal rules through an empirically informed, legal realist and critical socio-legal approach lens and assessing the distributive effects of rule changes on all categories of women occupying varied caste, class, religious, age and occupational statuses can we reimagine alternate regulatory matrices that can help secure women’s prospects for economic justice. This in turn poses new and urgent conceptual and political challenges for social reproduction theory.