Barbara Brents

Barb Brents is professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a co-author of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland (Routledge Press, 2010). Brents’ research and teaching interests include political sociology, gender and sexuality, urban sociology, and public sociology. Brents is also a faculty affiliate in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, and heads a research team collecting data about sex work clientele through a confidential online survey of adult industry consumption: the UNLV Consumer Survey. Her past research has explored intersections of politics, culture, economics and gender looking at topics such as the politics of terrorism and violence, and business and social policies. Her current research uses a political economy lens to study sex and gender in market culture, with recent work using the sex industry as a site to understand the intersections of culture and economics — including the construction of “market morality” in political debates around sexuality; the relation between tourism, consumption and sexuality; the emotional and bodily labor of selling sex; and consuming sex.

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