Exploring the Contested and Controversial Nature of the Sex Industry in India: Experiential Encounters by Sex-Workers from the Periphery

Abstract

Despite the prostitution industry being decriminalized and accorded a semi-legal status in India, the status of sex-workers remains abysmal with scarce provisions towards healthcare, education/literacy, and/or labour rights. Consequently, the current approach to the rights of sex-workers alongside trafficked persons is ridden with several structural barriers, as existing state rehabilitation projects often violate subjects’ bodily autonomy and act as moral discipliners, leaving them vulnerable to various forms of systemic and institutionalized violence. Moreover, their children are subject to rampant forms of discrimination and societal othering, culminating in a vicious cycle of socio-economic deprivation/impoverishment. However, notwithstanding the aforesaid top-down, exclusionary measures, there have been strong feminist undercurrents in the recent decades advocating for the inclusion of such marginalized actors. One such example is the NGO Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, comprising of many sex-workers as well as subjects from the LGBTQ community, who advocate the legalization of the prostitution industry in India, as they argue that its underground nature enhances networks of crime, and simultaneous workers’ stigmatization. Its social workers demand the dignity of their labour, addressal of HIV + STIs infecting the community, and awareness campaigns as inevitable first-steps towards eradicating the pervasive discrimination afflicting them. DURBAR workers actively champion for their rights as equal citizens, and instead critique state reform projects that merely seek to morally discipline women instead of providing concrete emancipation strategies towards socio-economic empowerment. They effectively use performative culture as a cogent means to embody subversion, and organize Nukkad Naataks (i.e., Street Plays), Carnivals, Music, and Dance shows in West Bengal towards building awareness on the various problems afflicting them, along with the need to adopt a rights-based over criminalizing paradigm. Especially against the disenfranchised status of such women located at the fringes of civil society today, such grassroots movements of resistance exemplify important signifiers of women’s bodily autonomy and occupational freedom. This article will incorporate analogous modalities of resistance from prominent sex-worker rights NGOs in India, alongside their strategies of collective organization and bottom-up solidarity through the lens of performative culture. Reliant on such accounts from the margins, this paper therefore elucidates how such instances of mobilization and resistance, epitomize significant catalysts of agency and social change, which otherwise go missing from the dominant annals of policy and developmental discourses. Such an inclusion of these occluded life-stories of stigmatized subjects can inform a profound change of discourse that includes the voices and lived experiences of India’s informal-sector female sex-workers, alongside advocates a more representative, bottom-up approach that takes into account their situational factors in the making of humanitarian protocols. Finally, via unpacking the experiential narratives of such marginalized actors, this paper attempts to encapsulate the intersectional concerns of gender activisms from the Global South, as well as inform feminist epistemologies by incorporating such silenced histories of subaltern women.