Abstract
Based on critical ethnography, archival research, and discourse analysis, Svati Shah makes an important intervention in the ongoing feminist debates on sex work or, as Shah prefers, sexual commerce—an overarching term that includes full-time sex work, episodic sex work, and sex work in exchange for paid work. Shah uses this term to frame sex work as one component of a livelihood strategy of poor migrant women rather than a gendered identity, a state of being from which women have to be rescued. This framing is meant to challenge the anti-trafficking discourse, which conflates sexual service with human trafficking. While this corrective is important, given that it is primarily poor women, and not poor men also facing similar struggles for survival, who engage in sexual commerce, a gendered analysis is still necessary.
Nevertheless, what Shah provides in this book is a much needed focus on the political economy of sexual commerce as a response to the precarious circumstances that landless dalit and scheduled tribe women find themselves in when they migrate to Mumbai to escape the lack of basic survival needs such as water and livelihood in their villages. In most cases, the women are the heads of households providing for their families. By integrating the conditions in their villages, such as lack of water due to increased sugarcane production and landlessness, with the limited opportunities that they find in the city, a result of their lack of skills and formal education, Shah makes a case for understanding sexual commerce in relation to neoliberal agricultural policies in the rural areas, the informal economy in the urban areas, migration, and urban space. Her most important contribution is that sex work is one of myriad livelihood strategies that poor migrant women use in a city like Mumbai to access housing and water and should not be reduced to violence and victimization though those are not absent from their lives.
This argument is made on the basis of participant observation and interviews with women in three spaces, nakas (street corners), which serve as public day labor markets, streets, and brothels (more methodological details along with the epistemological discussions would have been useful). On the nakas, women wait along with men for construction jobs which are hard to come by and hence they often end up going home without any work or going off with recruiters to exchange sex for work. While this was never acknowledged openly by anyone, it was an open secret. By contrast, sex work on the street and in the brothels is acknowledged both by the sex workers and known by the public. Even in both these sites, sex workers had engaged in wage labor before turning to sex work. Thus, Shah demonstrates the porosity between what are considered mutually exclusive categories, such as wage labor versus sexual commerce, informal versus formal economy, criminal and stigmatized versus legal activities. Additionally, Shah also demonstrates the ways in which spaces are also discursively constructed as distinct from one another such that nakas or streets are seen as safe places for commerce and families but not from which sex work may be solicited while brothels are seen only as unsafe spaces where sex work happens rather than places where women live and work.
In the ethnographically richest chapter on Kamathipura, the infamous red light district in Mumbai, Shah illustrates the impact of HIV/AIDS funding, anti-trafficking NGOs, and the changing occupational and real estate dynamics in the district. She shows how the HIV/AIDS prevention funding has provided important services to sex workers, particularly through peer education training, but has also resulted in overexposure to foreign and domestic researchers and NGOs, which she aptly calls sex research tourism. Moreover, the increase in police raids due to the anti-trafficking NGOs has led to a drastic reduction in the number of brothels, which have been replaced by small-scale industrial units employing mostly men. Situated in the heart of South Central Mumbai, it has also become a target for gentrification as developers seek land for high-rises for the expanding upper middle class.
In addition to the political economy of sexual commerce, Shah also demonstrates the complicated nature of women’s agency: neither merely an individual choice nor organized resistance, but the capacity to act, which is context specific and differential. Thus, majburi, helplessness, cannot be reduced to jabardasti, coercion. Overall, the book could have benefited from tighter editing to prevent the sometimes repetitive, theoretical discussion from overwhelming her ethnographic voice.