SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Sex workers in India have long battled singular, stereotypical representations of themselves as victim-criminals, or, as ‘key populations’ in India’s HIV/AIDS Targeted Intervention programmes since the late 1980s through the 1990s. This thesis engages with local understandings of identity and collectivity that, when tied to global misunderstandings, have inadvertently consigned Indian sex workers into globally ‘easy’ theories of neoliberal market logics. These simplifications slot their lives into words like ‘choice’, ‘victimhood’ and ‘freedom’, without understanding what that might mean for people beyond certain class-caste-economic locations. Using Patchwork Ethnography, this thesis translates my interlocutors’ life narratives, exploring connections between documentary films, sex worker led collectives and networks, identity formations, and cross-movement solidarities. I focus on everyday practices of cooperation, organising, localisation and public expression that sex workers engage in within a networked society and through undercurrents of continuous violence. Through these patches, I offer a gali (neighbourhood)-first story that focuses on cultural practices, identity and community making that moves beyond policy and law, evidencing the world-making capacity of sex workers’ collectives, expanding the language of political progress and social transformation. By pulling at the hem of narratives taken for granted, the thesis offers a post-intervention, and post-care anthropology that centres resistance, and negotiation with systems and networks of power, care, and governance.