Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Prabha Kotiswaran is lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"This groundbreaking study brilliantly maps feminist ideas that have powerfully influenced law reform around sex work and trafficking. Kotiswaran convincingly makes the case that the welfare of sex workers in the developing world depends on complex factors that can be identified only through a local, legal realist account, and which have been virtually ignored by feminist theory. Read this book: it will challenge what you think you know."--Janet Halley, Harvard Law School

"Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor makes a great contribution to feminist theory as it takes on the contentious debate within feminism between abolitionist and sex worker perspectives on trafficking. It offers a clear-eyed, judicious analysis of these positions and that of an emerging middle path, enriched by the insights provided by postcolonial feminism and Kotiswaran's fascinating ethnography on sex work in India."--Sally Engle Merry, New York University

"This book is fascinating, provocative, and likely to change the reader's ideas about sex work in the global south, about sex work in general, and about feminist responses to sex work. In a word, it is brilliant."--Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School

"Prabha Kotiswaran maps, in gifted yet poignant ways, the geographies of injustice in the third-world sex trade. Speaking to specific Indian social, political, and constitutional contexts, she fully addresses the obscenity of global sex trafficking, as well as interlocutes all our rather fond human-rights-friendly yet historically effete discourses. Kotiswaran tests and teases new insights arising from taking seriously the voices of suffering women."--Upendra Baxi, professor emeritus, University of Warwick

"A significant contribution to feminist theorization and legal studies of sex work. Taking up the polarized debate about sex work, Kotiswaran powerfully conveys the complexity of sex workers' experiences on the ground. A major strength of her analysis is how it highlights the need to understand the paradoxical effects of legal reform by contextualizing its realization in the web of civil rules, social norms, enforcement cycles, and market forces."--Sealing Cheng, Wellesley College

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................ixAbbreviations................................................................................................xiiOne Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: An Introduction..........................................................3Two Revisiting the Material: Recasting the Sex Work Debates..................................................24Three Theorizing the Lumpen Proletariat: A Genealogy of Materialist Feminism on Sex Work.....................50Four Not on the Lord's Agenda: The Traveling Sex Workers of Tirupati.........................................85Five Born unto Brothels: Sex Work in a Kolkata Red-Light Area................................................137Six Regulating Sex Markets: The Paradoxical Life of the Law..................................................185Seven Toward a Postcolonial Materialist Feminist Theory of Sex Work..........................................212Notes........................................................................................................251References...................................................................................................265Index........................................................................................................285

Chapter One

An Introduction

All day long, there was a buzz in the office. A rally had been called. Shanti, a sex worker in the Bow Bazaar area of central Kolkata, had been assaulted by her landlady, Ritu. Shanti had been behind on her rent for the past three weeks, and when she asked Ritu for more time since she didn't have any customers, Ritu had taken her to a nearby alley and beat her black and blue with a thick bamboo stick. Shanti showed us the bruises on her back, hands, and legs. She had been in the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) office all day with her lover and ten-month-old son. A meeting was held in the director's office in the morning. And by 3:00 PM, sex workers and project staff from all twenty-one Kolkata field areas of the DMSC converged on Bow Bazaar. When there is a protest rally at the DMSC, everyone, including the accountants, project coordinators, administrative staff, computer room staff, and "visitors" like myself, is required to join it. Projects are important, but at the DMSC there is a belief that its most important goal is to fight for sex workers' empowerment. By the time I reached Bow Bazaar with Mitra Routh, a field supervisor for Sonagachi, another major red-light area in North Kolkata, the narrow Prem Chand Boral Street was filled with sex workers and DMSC staff. At the end of the street, a small makeshift stage had been set up. The Polli Milan Sangh, a local club where the DMSC clinic is held, was teeming with sex workers taking shelter from the sweltering July heat.

Soon the meeting started, and many sex workers went up to the stage to address the gathering. This included leaders like Swapna Gayen, a sex worker and secretary of the DMSC and a longtime resident of Bow Bazaar, through whom the DMSC got to know about Shanti's abuse. Then there were branch committee members for the red-light area and older sex workers who were resident there who spoke out against Ritu's abusive behavior. Being at DMSC events, it is easy to forget how unusual it is for Indian sex workers to grab the mike and come out in front of hundreds of people to say they are sex workers, that they have been abused, and that we should do something about it. It is not surprising that the DMSC often uses these protest rallies as a training ground to improve the confidence and public-speaking skills of sex workers who can otherwise barely manage to say a few words. Some of the project staff and advisors to the DMSC also spoke, as did the president of the local club. Finally, it was Shanti's turn. She was very emotional and expressed her rage and frustration at Ritu. Then the rally started. There were about three hundred of us. The rally circled around the neighborhood. As we passed by, the people living in houses, and those working in the gold jewelry shops that Bow Bazaar is famous for, just stopped and stared at us. For me, the most unforgettable scene was when I peered into a blacksmith's shop and saw five men's faces in a row as they halted their work to look out at us.

We finally arrived at Ritu's house. A short sex worker right behind me was shouting slogans in Bengali against Ritu in a powerful voice. "DMSC is against dalals [touts/agents], mastans [hooligans], and abusive malkins [landladies]. Watch out, oh perpetrators of violence against Shanti, Durbar is here." After a few minutes in front of Ritu's house, we marched to the area police station, an old red brick colonial building. There, as we sat outside the police station, a few representatives of the sex workers went inside. A case had already been registered with the police the evening before. The police had arrested Ritu, who was released on bail that morning. While waiting there, I heard from Mitra that another sex worker had been beaten by Ritu two nights ago. She hadn't told anyone about it, but when she saw the strength of the rally, she came forth and accompanied Durbar representatives to the police station to register a case against Ritu. Such is the influence of the DMSC, which has been at the forefront of campaigning for workers' rights for Indian sex workers for more than a decade now.

The striking image of mobilized third world sex workers must startle us, bombarded as we routinely are by the media and the international human rights community with horrific stories of trafficking, wherein the embattled figure of the enslaved third world sex worker makes her way into the popular imagination in a highly particularized way. Not that these reports of trafficking are untrue. Yet the contrasting images of the protesting sex worker and enslaved sex worker embody profound normative contestations over how we understand the sale of sexual services for money. The proliferating images of third world sex slavery also contain within them a story of the politics of mobilization, of the disparately unequal spaces of international civil society (Batliwala 2002) wherein the struggles of localized and marginalized social movements like that of Kolkata's sex workers are barely audible. This stands in sharp contrast to the influence of feminism, both in international and national contexts, which is increasingly being propelled into the hallways of power, leading some of us to characterize it as "governance feminism" (Halley et al. 2006, 340; 2008a, 2008b). Many stories of movement politics, both on the part of sex workers and feminists, remain to be told. Yet those stories are not the focus of my book. I am instead interested here in exploring what the contemporary sex work debates render less visible, namely, the third world sex worker's normative demands that she be treated as a worker. Note what sex workers had to say (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee 2006) on the occasion of a rally organized under the aegis of the National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW), a network of Indian sex workers' organizations, including the DMSC, in March 2006 when protesting amendments to the federal anti–sex work law (or the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1956, also...