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Examining paths into and out of sex work followed by three women in Bangalore, India, this essay argues that the struggles of sex workers to secure a livelihood highlight the interlocking relationships of caste, class, and gender, as well as forms of autonomy and agency within these systems. Interview narratives reveal how gendered marginalization leads to precarious work; and precarious work leads to sexual stigma. They show how intersectionality theory can be placed in conversation with Marxist feminisms and Indian feminist scholarship on caste, class, and gender to illuminate patterns of gendered economic marginalization in urban India. Such an analysis offers a way to articulate the relationships of caste, class, and gender in the lives of sex workers and to illustrate how intersectionality theory can be extended when engaged transnationally.

Studies that capture sex workers’ experiences, as activists in collectives and unions, are scarce. In India, the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union (KSWU) materialized as a direct response to the violation of sex workers’ rights. The goal of this qualitative study was to review KSWU’s journey through the years. Forty-eight respondents participated in eight focus group discussions. Findings revealed the complexity of addressing the disparate needs of the heterogeneous group of sex workers in Karnataka. KSWU’s experiences suggest the potential for hybrid models of organizing that integrate activism with service provision.

Social class has long existed in tension with other forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality, both in academic and popular debate. While Marxist-influenced class primacy perspectives gained prominence in US sociology in the 1970s, they faded from view by the 1990s, replaced by perspectives focusing on culture and institutions or on intersectional analyses of how multiple forms of social difference shape durable patterns of disempowerment and marginalization. More recently, class and capitalism have reasserted their place on the academic agenda, but continue to coexist uneasily with analyses of oppression and social difference. Here we discuss possibilities for bridging the gap between studies of class and other forms of social difference. We contend that these categories are best understood in relation to each other when situated in a larger system with its own endogenous dynamics and tendencies, namely capitalism. After providing an historical account of the fraught relationship between studies of class and other forms of social difference, we propose a theoretical model for integrating understandings of class and social difference using Wright et al.‘s concept of dynamic asymmetry. This shifts us away from discussions of which factors are most important in general toward concrete discussions of how these factors interact in particular cases and processes. We contend that class and other forms of social difference should not be studied primarily as traits embodied in individuals, but rather with respect to how these differences are organized in relation to each other within a framework shaped by the dynamics of capitalist development.

Laws geared toward regulating the employment relationship cling to traditional definitions of workplaces, neglecting the domain of the home and those who work there. Domestic workers, a population of largely immigrant women of color, have performed labor inside of New York City's homes for centuries and yet have consistently been denied coverage under labor law protections at both the state and federal level. This article traces out the exclusions of domestic workers historically and then turn to a particular piece of legislation – the 2010 New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights – which was the first law of its kind to regulate the household as a site of labor, therefore disrupting that long-standing pattern. However, the law falls short in granting basic worker protections to this particular group. Drawing from 52 in-depth interviews and analysis of legislative documents, The author argues that the problematics of the law can be understood by recognizing its embeddedness, or rather the broader political, legal, historical, and social ecology within which the law is embedded, which inhibited in a number of important ways the law's ability to work. This article shows how this plays out through the law obscuring the specificity of where this labor is performed – the home – as well as the demographic makeup of the immigrant women of color – the whom – performing it. Using the case study of domestic workers' recent inclusion into labor law coverage, this article urges a closer scrutiny of and attention to the changing nature of inequality, race, and gender present in employment relationships within the private household as well as found more generally throughout the low-wage sector.

This paper aims to prepare third-order nonlinear optical (NLO) organic materials with large nonlinear optimization value, high damage threshold and ultrafast response time.

A series of novel symmetric and asymmetric compounds possessing third-order NLO properties were synthesized using 1,3,5-tribromobenzene as the basis. The photophysical and electrochemical properties, as well as the click reactions, were characterized by means of UV–VIS–NIR absorption spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry.

The donor–acceptor chromophores were inserted into compound, making the molecule to have a broader absorption in the near-infrared regions and a narrower optical and electrochemical band gap. It also formed an electron-delocalized organic system, which has larger effects on achieving a third-order NLO response. The third-order NLO phenomenon of benzene ring complexes was experimentally studied at 532 nm using Z-scan technology, and some compounds showed the expected NLO properties.

The click products exhibit more NLO phenomena by performing different click combinations to the side groups, opening new perspectives on using the system in a variety of photoelectric applications.