India Thusi

I. India Thusi is an award-winning scholar, legal anthropologist, and Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute. She is Professor of Law and Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Her research examines the regulation of sex, sexuality, race, and gender, with particular attention to sex work, sexual expression, vice policing, criminalization, trafficking, and the ways governments and private institutions regulate sexual behavior, sexual markets, and intimate life.

Thusi is the author of Policing Bodies: Law, Sex Work, and Desire in Johannesburg (Stanford University Press), an ethnographic and legal study of sex work policing in South Africa. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, New York University Law Review, California Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and other leading journals. Her article “The Racialized History of Vice Policing” received the Law and Society Association’s 2024 John Hope Franklin Prize for outstanding scholarship on race, racism, and law.

Her current scholarship examines the historical and contemporary regulation of vice, the relationship between sex work and sex trafficking, the private regulation of sexual morality, abolitionist approaches to law, and emerging forms of algorithmic and virtual sexuality. This work includes questions surrounding artificial intelligence, digitally mediated intimacy, sexual expression, sexual simulation, and the expanding role of technological platforms and private institutions in governing sexual conduct. Across these projects, she is particularly interested in how legal and social categories such as victimhood, deviance, consent, exploitation, obscenity, intimacy, and criminality are constructed and how those categories are shaped by race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and institutional power.

Trained in both law and social anthropology, Thusi combines doctrinal, historical, theoretical, comparative, and ethnographic methods. She has conducted extensive research in South Africa and has also studied differing approaches to sex work regulation in Sweden and New Zealand. She has served as a Fulbright U.S. Global Scholar and a W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Fellow at Harvard University. Before entering the legal academy, she clerked for Judge Robert L. Carter of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who served as lead counsel for the NAACP in Brown v. Board of Education, and later served as a Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellow and Racial Justice Attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.