Gender and Sexuality in India

Selling Sex in Chennai

Salla Sariola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135179496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

India has one of the highest numbers of HIV carriers in the world. HIV has remained associated with sex work, and large sums of money provided to fund public health interventions have come from global institutions such as UNAIDS, the World Bank and USAID. In the midst of these processes, however, sex workers and their everyday lives have been hidden behind the rhetorics of control and prevention.

This book offers a detailed analysis of the experiences of sex workers in Chennai. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it draws out themes of agency; notions of gender and sexuality; and the HIV prevention industry. While the women's experiences are closely knit into the medical discourse regarding sex workers, sex work emerges as a complicated knot of poverty, desire, women's oppression, love, co-option, and motherhood. The author examines how the sex workers actively negotiate the risks of their industry and suggests alternative discourses on women's sexuality, sexual behaviour and desire, arguing that unless the power imbalances affecting women are addressed, such policies and activities will have little impact. She brings attention to the problems of current policies, discourses and attitudes regarding HIV, sexuality and sex work, and shows how new policies could help to reduce vulnerabilities not only for sex workers, but perhaps for all women in India.

1
Introduction

During my fieldwork in Chennai (formerly Madras), capital of Tamil Nadu in the south of India, between August 2004 and August 2005, I began to realise that I could use even the journeys to work—to the offices of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with commercial sex workers, or to interview some of their members and visitors—as opportunities to observe and understand what it means to be a sex worker in the city. One morning I challenge the traffic over a stinky river and get to the bus stop.

I have learned that women solicit by standing at bus stops. I look around at the women there. I know that the sex workers do not look any different from other women, so anyone could be soliciting. I look around me… Would I be able to identify a sex worker after meeting so many? Autorikshaws drive slowly past the bus stop, offering rides. As far as I know, some autorikshaw drivers act as middlemen. I catch a man staring at me. I quickly turn my eyes away.

I am on my way to meet a sex worker for an interview. I met her a couple of months earlier at an NGO meeting. We were introduced by other sex workers, and she was keen on being interviewed for my research. First, I must collect my translator at the Vadapazhani bus depot near the film studios, near the sex worker’s neighbourhood. Suddenly, while I am waiting for my translator, two women that I know walk past. They see me and stop to talk. They speak Tamil very quickly; I can understand enough to tell that they know me from the NGO. They act strangely, talk and laugh loudly and are distracted, and I realise that they are drunk. Being drunk is very rare for Tamil women, but it is a common way for sex workers to relax. It dawns on me that they have probably been seeing clients. I greet them, but after exchanging niceties in a somewhat haphazard way (the women are giggling, erratic in their conversation), they tumble away.

My translator arrives and we walk to where the sex worker lives. After our initial introduction at the NGO, we had arranged a previous meeting to which she never showed up. After bumping into her again at the NGO, she convinced me that she still wanted to talk to me; she had just been unable to be home at the previous time we had arranged. This time, she is there. She invites us in with a smile. ‘Vanakkam, vanakkam! Vaange vaangel’ (‘Hello, hello! Come in, come in!’). We are invited inside and sit on the floor. Her house is small, with brick walls and a thatched roof. Colourful plastic pots of water are lined up next to the wall. She has a small kerosene stove; cooking pots fill the shelves. There are pictures of dead relatives and images of gods on the wall. After polite questions regarding her family’s health, her health, her children’s health, and the well-being of all the people we know together, I ask how she feels about the interview. She says she’s happy to talk, and I pull out the recorder. I explain to her once again about my work, and that what she tells me will be confidential and anonymous, and that I will not share her information with the NGOs. She sends a neighbour, who has come in to see what is going on, to buy some cool drinks for us. I ask her to tell me, in her own words, her life story. The following narrative is not based on one individual, but it is merged together from the narratives of several women whom I interviewed during my fieldwork.

Mariamma starts by recounting a normal day in her life as a sex worker. She is a woman in her late twenties and a mother of two, living in a small hut in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. On this particular day she sends the children to school, washes the dishes from the night before and prepares some rice and sambar, a soupy lentil curry, for the evening. She washes the children’s clothes and hangs them to dry. Around noon, she gets a phone call. An older lady she knows from her neighbourhood tells her that there are clients who would pay for sex, if she was interested. (The lady is her madam, an older sex worker who connects sex workers with men who want to pay for sex.) Mariamma is penniless and the ration of rice is almost gone. Her children have not eaten anything else but the thin sambar that whole week. Her son, in particular, has had a cough for a long time. Mariamma is worried. The lady on the phone tells her that there are two men waiting at Parry’s Corner, a big bus depot. Mariamma says yes and rushes to call her friend Sarasvati, who agrees to come along. (Mariamma and Sarasvati like to work together; it provides them with security and makes them feel less alone. They have been friends for a long time and they know everything about each other. They always go to meet clients together—about three times a week.)

Mariamma gets dressed for her work. She changes from her nightgown into a sari. She puts on a bright red bra underneath. She has three saris hanging from a string on the wall. They are all made of cheap, artificial material: one yellow, one blue and one red. She chooses the yellow one and folds it around her. She searches for her red lipstick; she has hidden it away from the children in the far end corner of her cupboard. She sees herself from a cracked piece of mirror, applies lipstick on her lips and rubs it on her cheeks as well. Finally, she brushes her long hair and plaits it. To please the clients, she wants to look beautiful—but not too flashy: she does not want to draw too much attention to herself. She is afraid that someone might recognise her and realise what she is doing. She is afraid for her own and her children’s reputation. If she were caught then everybody would come to know. She is sure that she would then have to move house again and her children would be thrown out of their school. It has happened to others.

Mariamma walks through the area she lives in—a slum area that has been improved a little by a local NGO. The neighbourhood has concrete houses and water pumps at the ends of the roads. The water truck comes twice a week to fill up the water tanks, but even so it is not enough for everybody for the whole week. Most of the houses are similar, with two floors, with families from different backgrounds living together. Within the houses, the flats are small, around three by three metres each, with a small kitchen space and a communal toilet. The narrow roads are just wide enough to drive an aattoo (autorikshaw) through; they are covered with broken and crumbled concrete. It takes about 20 minutes for Mariamma to walk from her house to the main road and the bus stop. It is hot and she is sweating, but she cannot afford to take an autorikshaw every time. She meets Sarasvati at the main junction, they buy plenty of flowers to put into their hair and then catch a bus to Parry’s Corner.

At Parry’s Corner, it takes them a long time to find the men. Parry’s Corner is a big bus depot: hundreds of buses depart daily to take people to the neighbourhoods of Chennai. While the women search for the men, two policemen patrol the area. Mariamma freezes; she is afraid of the police. She has experienced what it means to be caught at the bus stop and questioned. Other women have also told her that the policemen at the station demand money, and that they force women to have sex with them. The two women stand on a platform and pretend that they are waiting for a bus until the policemen have gone.

Finally, they use their mobile phone to call the clients: they are standing next to a fruit vendor. The four of them greet like people who know each other well, to avoid attention. The men are in their mid-20s. They are dressed in white-collared shirts and straight trousers. One of them has a mobile phone hanging from his neck, tucked away in the front pocket of his shirt. They look decent, so the women decide to go with them. The men say that they will pay Rs. 500 between the two of them. Mariamma and Sarasvati agree and they all walk together to a nearby lodge.

The lodge is dirty, with faded turquoise walls, stained from the damp of many rainy seasons. Images of Hindu gods hang from the wall. The men pay Rs. 100 for the room and they all go in. The men who run the lodge know well what the room is for, but they ask no questions. The room has two small bare beds and nothing more. The sheets are dirty. Mariamma confirms that they will get Rs. 500 and clarifies that there has to be condoms.

The men have brought a bottle of whisky with them and they offer it to the women. Mariamma and Sarasvati have a drink to relax. They chat. Mariamma nearly vomits from the bitter taste of the whisky but it soothes her and she soon feels floppy. Sarasvati chats to the fatter man. Mariamma turns to take off her sari, folds it carefully and places it in the corner, now feeling vulnerable and exposed. In the meantime, Sarasvati starts to give oral sex to the fat man. Mariamma does not look. The slim man wants her to take all her clothes off- the petticoat, blouse and the red bra—but she refuses. He grabs her breasts forcefully, pulls her blouse so that it tears and shows the red bra, and throws her onto the bed. He climbs on top of her and penetrates her. By this point, Mariamma is so drunk that she has stopped worrying about anything. As soon as everything is over, the women demand the money. It turns out that the men only have Rs.400 with them. The women protest and quarrel with the men, but as the men say they have no more, Mariamma and Sarasvati have to accept whatever they can get, and leave.

They wander off to Parry’s Corner and chat. They are agitated at being cheated. Mariamma has a pounding headache and her body aches too. They stop to buy some meals, rice and spicy curry sauces, and take them back to Mariamma’s house to eat. Sarasvati leaves and Mariamma lies down on the mat on the floor to take some rest. She falls asleep thinking of her children. She feels how much she loves them and tears fill her eyes.

The above narrative illustrates the concerns of some of the women who sell sex in India. The narrative also shows how difficult it is to research female sex workers. There is a silence—around women’s sexuality, around the shame that many women experienced and risks they took by identifying themselves as sex workers—that makes it hard to engage with sex workers and truncated what they told me. The findings I report in this book are framed by these difficulties and the particular perspective that directed my questions: to analyse the lives of sex workers outwith the medicalised perspective implied in HIV prevention, the predominant public discourse where sex work is addressed in India.

Until the discovery of HIV amongst a group of sex workers deported from Mumbai to Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, in 1986, commercial sex workers hardly appeared on the public map of issues and concerns. Twenty years later, the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) (2006) announced that India, with 5.7 million people, had the highest number of HIV carriers in the world. The association between sex work and HIV that characterised the start of the history of HIV in India has been prominent since, and HIV has remained associated with sex work more than with any other ‘high-risk groups’, such as homosexuals or intravenous drug users. Not surprisingly, then, many agencies —governmental as well as NGOs, national and international—have been interested in harnessing sex workers to prevent HIV. Global institutions, such as UNAIDS, the World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have provided large amounts of resources to fund and organise public health interventions. While this framing of the problem of HIV has brought much needed attention to curb its spread, in the midst of these processes, sex workers and their everyday lives have been hidden from view. The rhetorics of control and prevention have dominated the debate. The argument in this book is that such a medicalised view is limited, detached from the lives of the sex workers, and can lead to very partial and misleading evidence and thus to ineffective policies.

Feminist and post-structuralist approaches to sex work

I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, between August 2004 and August 2005. I interviewed fifty-six women, and took part in activities and interviewed staff at six NGOs that were involved in HIV prevention work. Throughout this book my concern is to describe the lives of sex workers, as far as possible, using their own words. I have been particularly alert to evidence of agency: actions, decisions and responses through which these women show how far, when and where they have been able to take some control over their lives. Without victimising or judging them, my account shows how marginalised women use power to negotiate their lives. I argue and provide evidence for how selling sex was one way of negotiating the material and discursive contexts through which the women navigated their everyday lives. Looking beyond the medicalised discourse regarding sex workers, selling sex can be seen as a complicated knot of poverty, desire, women’s oppression, love, co-option, and motherhood. I do not take a stance on the wider issues of structure and agency that have fascinated and exhausted social scientists for decades, but rather provide a nuanced analysis of the power that sex workers use as individuals in seemingly powerless positions. Recently, agency has been discussed in post-structuralist feminist writings and although my analysis fits loosely into this theoretical framework, it is not an attempt to test these theories by reference to the lives of the sex workers. My methodology demands the opposite—an analysis that is strongly rooted in the data from my fieldwork and to the voices of the sex workers. Central to my use of the concept of agency is Foucault’s theory of power. In his History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Foucault (1998 [1976]: 92–102) suggests that power exists in all relationships and is thus everywhere and ever present. The idea that this power can be used by all individuals has enabled analyses in which individuals are seen as subjects who negotiate the time- and space-specific contexts that they live in. Following this theoretical premise, throughout this book I provide evidence of how we should see sex workers—like other individuals—as individuals who are able to negotiate the conditions of oppressive discourses, structures of patriarchy and stigma on prostitution that surround them to various degrees, and not as essentialised victims.¹

How do we understand the agency of people who seemingly have little power? How do we understand why women engage with practices that, from a liberalist viewpoint, are oppressive? One viewpoint suggests that such women might be suffering from false consciousness. According to another, women have been socialised into their own oppression (for a critique of these positions, see Mahmood 2005:6). My position departs from these writings: rather than labelling these women as victims who are passive or unable to understand their best interest, we need to understand the ways in which human agency exists within structures of subordination, but without romanticising this activity as resistance (see, for example, AbuLughod 1990; Scott 1985).

The work of Saba Mahmood provides a relevant model for my approach. In the first chapter of her book on women’s participation in a pious Islamic movement in Egypt, Politics of Piety—The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Mahmood 2005), she problematises the conceptual underpinning of feminism as a derivative of liberalist and emancipatory politics. Mahmood questions the universality of the desire to be ‘free’ of structures of domination and suggests that the concept of resistance has been part of a liberalist project. By discussing resistance only in the context of ‘acting against domination’, such an approach also reinforces the dichotomy of agency as either resistance or domination—leaving little or no space for anything else. Following Foucault, Mahmood argues that in order to understand power and agency properly, these issues need to be studied in their historical and cultural contexts. From a liberalist framework and without cultural contextualisation, some action might be missed or misinterpreted ‘from outside’. It is overly simplistic, Mahmood argues, to look at resistance only as activity against, for example, patriarchal dominance; instead, all action should be seen as agency. This takes the analysis of power used by marginalised groups a step further. It is not only a necessary to understand how agency is enacted by people who seemingly have little power but also to recognise that there are forms of agency that do not aim at ‘liberation’. Instead, agency should be understood as holistic ‘activity’ that includes both —at times this might mean that people make choices that are ‘restricting’ and ‘oppressive’ and at other times and places ‘subversive’ and ‘liberating’. From Mahmood’s perspective, both liberatory and oppressive forces can operate in an individual’s life simultaneously. Following the same logic, my book is, therefore, a study of how oppression and agency can co-exist in the lives of sex workers in contemporary India. This book is an analysis of agency on the margins, and I explore four key themes on how the women I interviewed as part of this research used agency. I show how they understood and explained their involvement in sex work, how they benefited from their relationships with HIV prevention NGOs, how they negotiated the problems in sex work, and, finally, how they used power with regard to issues of sexuality—an area with least power for women in Indian society.

The developing argument

Sex workers are some of the most vulnerable people in India today, and the violent realities of sex workers’ lives are undeniable. The women I interviewed lived in oppressive contexts where jobs for women are rare, poor women are often forced to take sole responsibility for children, and they may have few other family contacts. All of these issues affect the lives of other poor women: in addition, as sex workers, the women I met were vulnerable to violence by police and clients. These women were also frequently ostracised by their families, and many lived in fear of spoiling the reputations of their children. Many of them had internalised the stigma surrounding sex work to the extent that they dreaded the sex work they did. Furthermore, their ability to negotiate the use of condoms was limited: they are in an inferior social position in all domains of power in the client encounter—in terms of gender, money and their disrespected role as a sex worker—which makes them constantly vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases (HIV and STDs). Nevertheless, these women were still able to make choices and act on their own account, both on a daily basis and in the long term. They negotiated performing sex in ways that were least harmful to them, physically and mentally, and that were the least harmful to their reputation.

Such a viewpoint—one that recognises that women in sex work can have agency and/or are not just victims of their surroundings—has informed some existing academic debates of sex work (predominantly originating from the global North), particularly over whether selling sex is work or essentially violence against women. This viewpoint rejects the abolitionist stance to prostitution (for example, Barry 1984; Jeffreys 1997) according to which women who sell sex are victims of the power relations between men and women. Sex workers’ movements argue that selling sex is work and that women have the right to do with their ...

Table of contents

• Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Contextualising sex work in Chennai
• 3 Women in sex work
• 4 What happened to 3.2 million people?
• 5 Negotiating the problems of selling sex
• 6 Alternative discourses of sex and sexuality
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index