Abstract
In Street Corner Secrets, Svati Shah offers an alternative to the dominant frameworks used to analyze commercial sex work in South Asia, which tend to conflate prostitution with human trafficking, violence, and victimhood. Instead, Shah situates the lives and livelihoods of women selling sexual services in the broader, more complicated, and thus more humanizing frames of labor, migration, and the informal economy. Bringing the study of prostitution out of the brothel and into Mumbai’s crowded streets and working class neighborhoods, Shah reveals that sexual commerce is one of several livelihood strategies pursued by the city’s female migrants. And while she takes care not to brush over the violence and humiliations her informants experience, she demonstrates that their struggles are shaped as much byhousing insecurity, limited access to municipal services, and police harassment—experiences shared by most poor and working-class migrants in Mumbai—as they are a direct result of their participation in the commercial sex trade. Providing a nuanced portrait of migrant livelihoods, a gendered analysis of urban informality, and a sociological reframing of commercial sex work, Street Corner Secrets is an impressive piece of urban ethnography that deserves to be widely read and referenced.
The book is organized around the three main sites in which sexual services are exchanged in Mumbai. The first two chapters are centered on observations and conversations at the nakas, or street corners, that function as daily wage-labor markets at certain times of certain days. Roughly 300,000 men and women seek work each day in the dozens of nakas spread across greater Mumbai. The work sought here includes small-scale construction projects or repair jobs overseen by private contractors or municipal employees. But almost as frequently, sexual services are bought and sold at the naka. The two chapters set here highlight the migration stories of female day laborers and the struggles they face accessing housing and basic services in the city’s informal settlements or bastis. Their stories also reveal the economic challenges they face and the variety of ways they fill their income gaps. For female laborers, prostitution is one of these ways. But most of the women introduced in these chapters engage in episodic sex work alongside and intertwined with other activities including construction and domestic work, small-scale commerce, and piecework manufacturing.
Chapter Three is located on a busy city street adjacent to a commuter rail station in one of Mumbai’s crowded northern suburbs. Prostitution is more visible here than in the nakas, where ambiguities and silences shroud the exchange of sexual services. On this particular street, roughly fifteen women regularly “stroll” to solicit customers, while another twenty to thirty appear on a less regular basis. Shah’s insightful account reveals the street as a deeply contested site where shop owners, the police, nongovernmental organizations, and sex workers struggle over appropriate and respectable uses of the space. Shah uses this site to explore the complexities of criminality and policing, as well as the layers of regulation, enforcement, and non-enforcement that shape the commercial sex trade and the informal economy more broadly. She also uses this space to discuss the separation of spheres, as many of the migrants use the geographic distances between their places of work and communities of residence to help maintain their anonymity and protect themselves and their families from scandal.
The third site, discussed in Chapter Four, is Mumbai’s famed red light district of Kamathipura. While this neighborhood of brothels is typically the first place referenced in discussions of prostitution in Mumbai, Shah demonstrates that Kamathipura is just one of several sites in which commercial sex is exchanged in the city and has, in fact, experienced a relative decline in recent years. Shah situates three main arguments in this site. First, she further elaborates her overarching contention that sexual commerce is just one thread in the complex web of migration and remittances that support individuals and communities across the city and countryside. Second, she demonstrates that brothel-based prostitution has been constructed as a spectacle by the popular media and abolition-centered NGOs, which has helped craft the tragic figures of the trafficked woman and child. Quite distinct from the realities experienced by the female migrants working in Kamathipura, this narrative convinces publics, the police, and aid workers that their lives are knowable and the solutions are clear. And finally, Shah discusses the development pressures, gentrification, and subsequent housing insecurity that are reshaping Kamathipura and the spatial organization of informal economic activity in contemporary Mumbai.
This last argument is demonstrated through two vignettes of Kamathipura, the first from the beginning of her decade-long research period and the second from the end. When Shah began her study in 2002,Kamathipura housed roughly 30,000 brothel-based sex workers. Each evening, the lanes would be lined with women selling sexual services to working-class and business men before they returned home to their families in the suburbs. By 2012, newly built high-rise apartments, office buildings, and shopping malls were encroaching upon the area, while the population of sex workers had dwindled to around 2,000. Shah attributes Kamathipura’s decline as a commercial sex district to real estate pressures and plans to transform Mumbai into a “world-class” city, while journalists and social workers have tended to emphasize concerns about HIV and AIDS. While she does not discount the significant impact that the AIDS epidemic has had on places like Kamathipura, she points out that this narrative—much like the trafficking and victim narratives—allows observers and policy makers to brush over social structures and the agency of sex workers.
The workers’ agency comes through clearly in the migrant profiles Shah provides in each chapter. Women like Meeta, Lina, and Najma, having migrated from villages in Eastern Maharashtra, Northern Karnataka, or somewhere in Bengal (probably Bangladesh), each have distinct stories of how they ended up in Mumbai and came to work, at least in part, in the commercial sex trade. Shah’s writing allows the women to construct their own narratives, which powerfully demonstrate the complexity and humanity of their experiences. As we might expect, her informants tend not to define themselves as sex workers. Instead, they describe their experiences as migrants and employ categories of class to understand their positions in the labor market. Shah points out that their discussions of class are frequently infused with “public expression(s) of caste,” which she argues signals a fractured experience of modernity (p. 99).
This adapted class analysis allows Shah to reframe sex work through a Marxian framework of economic production, departing from the more common lenses of human trafficking and HIV/AIDS. Shah is not alone in making this shift, as she acknowledges, but this book is an important contribution to this emerging area of scholarship. Yet while the ethnographic vignettes effectively illuminate the structural relations and power dynamics that shape the lives of female migrants, Shah’s class analysis could have been further developed with more explicit discussion of the relations of production, structures of power, and emerging forms of consciousness among the migrants/workers.
In addition to its sociological reframing of sex work, Street Corner Secrets makes several key contributions to critical urban studies. First, the work provides a usefully gendered analysis of urban informality and the informal economy. It refines the overly broad category of informal workers to demonstrate some of the ways that gender, class, and caste shape how workers navigate the law and its selective enforcement in their pursuit of livelihoods. Second, it offers important insights on the impacts of neoliberal globalization on the economic geography of contemporary Mumbai. The development pressures discussed in Chapter Four are woven throughout the earlier chapters as well, as the context of “world-class” city-making and slum demolitions shapes the lives of female migrants and their economic opportunities. That Shah is able to successfully weave these additional threads into an already detailed tapestry speaks to her effective writing and astute sociological analysis. Street Corner Secrets should be widely ready and celebrated as a contribution to urban ethnography, migration studies, and the political economy of sex work.