Session #7: Sunday, 11 January, 12.15 - 14.00 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Prabha Kotiswaran, Lecturer in Law, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (pk5@soas.ac.uk EditRegion33)
Chair/discussant: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, Department of English (rajeswari.sunderrajan@googlemail.com)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
Amidst a global sex panic on trafficking and prostitution, the proposed panel reflects on the distinctly Indian regulatory debates on sex work. Panellists will examine the shifting terrain of legal discourse at historical and contemporary moments, will ask whether the political economy of Indian sex markets call for a different conceptual vocabulary in debating the regulation of sex work and consider the responses of Indian sex workers and bar dancers themselves to these debates.
Global debates on prostitution have included many different kinds of actors, including governments, feminist, health and development-related non-governmental organizations, academics, and sex workers' advocacy groups. These debates have given rise to a vigorous debate on the best governmental response to prostitution. The recent controversy about the revision of the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act is a case in point. While these debates loom large in public discourses of sex work and governmentality, the question of whom they ultimately impact remains. In this paper, I build on the notion that the debate on criminalization versus decriminalization in prostitution primarily targets brothel based sex work. In its 2006 Baseline Serosurveillance Study, NACO estimated that 30% of sex work in India is brothel based, and that other 70% is non-brothel based. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork of non-brothel based prostitution in Mumbai, I discuss the impact of the discourse on criminalization for both brothel-based and non-brothel based sex work, and where and how the organized sex workers' rights movement intersects with non-brothel based prostitution. I end the paper with a discussion of sex work as an informal sector economic activity, and the ways in which the non-brothel based manifestations of this sector demand new thinking on access to public space, solicitation, and urban regulation. These issues, in turn throw up questions of biopolitical survival, urbanization, and, ultimately, citizenship mediated through normative axes of sexuality.
This paper will review the history of law making on prostitution in Bombay across the span of about eighty years from 1860 to 1940. I will feature key moments of public campaigns to abolish, or control, commercial sex, and elaborate the responses of municipal and police officials. In examining how laws could be appropriated in unexpected ways by local nationalist elites, and also how colonial government functionaries could undermine the coherence and impact of colonial discourses, I offer an argument for understanding imperial processes as more multifarious, and less orderly, than colonial discourses themselves projected.
The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India’s largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exists highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including, sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network— consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms and market structures—routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi’s sex industry. By employing a legal realist framework, I seek to recast current policy debates on sex work.
This paper attempts to bring together critical approaches to sexuality, law and labour in order to indicate some of the complicated relationships between sex worker organizations in India, and some of the activist groups who have engaged with them. The paper begins with a mapping of activist positions on sex work in India in recent years, focusing on women's groups, queer groups and labour leaders. It does not analyse, given space and time constraints, engagements with political party-affiliated organizations (where women's groups and trade unions are concerned), but restricts itself for the most part to autonomous structures. The paper looks at activist interventions by placing them in dialogue with the attempts of sex worker groups to seek support and alliances, particularly in the context of specific campaigns or struggles. The paper ultimately compares the organizing strategies of three sex worker movements that have sought broad activist support (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, the Bar Girls Union, and the Karnataka Sex Worker Union), suggesting that the strategies drew on historical lessons and unsuccessful attempts to articulate common ground.