New South Asian Feminisms

Paradoxes and Possibilities

Srila Roy, Srila Roy

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780321929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

South Asian feminism is in crisis. Under constant attack from right-wing nationalism and religious fundamentalism and co-opted by 'NGO-ization' and neoliberal state agendas, once autonomous and radical forms of feminist mobilization have been ideologically fragmented and replaced. It is time to rethink the feminist political agenda for the predicaments of the present. This timely volume provides an original and unprecedented exploration of the current state of South Asian feminist politics. It will map the new sites and expressions of feminism in the region today, addressing issues like disability, Internet technologies, queer subjectivities and violence as everyday life across national boundaries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Written by young scholars from the region, this book addresses the generational divide of feminism in the region, effectively introducing a new 'wave' of South Asian feminists that resonates with feminist debates everywhere around the globe.

1 | Sex workers’ rights and women’s movements in India: a very brief genealogy

SVATI P. SHAH¹

Since the mid-1990s, international interest in prostitution has become increasingly consolidated within the discourse on human trafficking. Trafficking is the dominant metaphor and analytic frame for understanding sexual commerce, particularly for the majority of Western governments (with notable exceptions, e.g. New Zealand) and for the majority of multilateral development agencies and financial institutions. While the official discourse on sexual commerce has become entwined with the idea of human trafficking, sex workers’ rights movements have also emerged the world over, tracing their recent histories back to the early days of grassroots AIDS activism and the development of the funded HIV/AIDS services sector. The internationalized rise in institutionalized interests in prostitution, particularly among international organizations and governmental agencies seeking to intervene in how sexual commerce is currently defined and regulated, has been produced in no small part through the idea of sexual commerce in the global South, and specifically through the idea that there is little capacity for local response to prostitution in the global South. In this exploratory piece, I situate the internationalized discourse on sexual commerce within India, and specifically within Indian feminist and HIV/AIDS movements, in order to offer a brief genealogy of the current proliferation of interest in prostitution in India. In sketching this genealogy, I discuss the ways in which this interest has become meaningfully interpolated within internationalized discourses on sexual commerce. The contemporary moment is a significant one, owing to the internationalization of abolitionist anti-prostitution analyses and policies, and their effects.

Feminism and sex work

A marker for the politics of sex work anywhere is the discursive distinction between ‘feminist movements’ and ‘sex worker movements’, a distinction that raises the question of whether, and why, these movements are discrete. To be sure, sex worker movements have evolved distinctly from ‘feminist’ (or ‘women’s’) movements, an evolution that signals the theoretical and strategic tensions between them, to be sure, but tensions that are never a priori. Over the course of the twentieth century, people who sell sexual services were represented by various social movements as, at best, evidence of historically consistent and/or continuous social and political inequality. At worst, social movements of all stripes have treated sex workers as either abject victims, or as immoral pariahs. The consolidation of an independent set of organizations seeking to represent the perspectives of sex workers per se is relatively new, the ancient guilds of prostitutes mentioned in the Arthashastras notwithstanding.

The route to a contemporary rights-based sex workers’ movement that has international linkages must be traced through the discourse of sex work among women’s movements over the course of the twentieth century. Women’s movements have been among the most vocal about prostitution for three major reasons: first, because the iconic subject of prostitution is discursively produced as a female seller of sexual services; secondly, because prostitution was held up as evidence of the existence of gender-based social hierarchies early in the development of a contemporary feminist political and theoretical framework; and thirdly, because, with the consolidation of prostitution as a distinct and discrete commercial practice during the late nineteenth century, female sellers of sexual services came to be understood by feminist reformers as inhabiting the ultimate allegory of all women’s (‘un’) worth. This last point has had profound implications for prostitution as a career since the late nineteenth century in India.

While the transaction of sexual services for money has been presented by some feminists as an indication of the reduction of women’s bodies to a singular, objectified image and function, anti-abolitionist sex workers’ organizations and advocates have forcefully argued against this perspective. The conflation of prostitution with the summary objectification of women is one way in which women’s movements institutionalized in government have precluded the inclusion of sex workers as feminists in those movements. According to this formulation, female sex workers can be apprehended only as victims of systematic patriarchal oppression, and are therefore either symbolic of that oppression, or serve as participants in perpetuating that oppression on other women. Some feminists have extrapolated this equation between prostitution and gender inequality to argue for the abolition of all sexual commerce. The feminist abolitionist position on sex work has tended to conflate prostitution, human trafficking and violence. The idea that all these concepts are indelibly similar, linked and co-constitutive has driven much of the policy debate on prostitution and human trafficking since the late 1990s, and has informed legal responses to prostitution in the USA, Sweden, Cambodia, South Korea and, most recently, Taiwan, where prostitution has become increasingly criminalized.

The impasses between feminist and sex worker movements have been addressed many times in the past decade, such that there is no longer as clear a categorical division between ‘feminists’ and ‘sex workers’² as there has been historically. It has therefore become more and more crucial over time to specify to which political category of feminists and sex workers one is referring when describing the polarities of the debate on prostitution. At the same time, the alliances that are being built between sex worker, feminist, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer (LGBTQ) movements around the world are resulting in shifts in perceptions of sex workers as being only, or primarily, biological women. Shifting these perceptions has also entailed disrupting the notion of a helpless woman or girl who needs rescuing from the universalized horrors of prostitution, a notion that has rested at the centre of the production of a gendered victim/rescuer dyad within the abolitionist discourse, in which the victims are always girls and young women. Critics of abolitionism as a unilateral approach to prostitution have argued against this, not because women and girls are never victimized by sex industries, but because the notion of victimization as a universal truth of prostitution hampers both efforts to offer real assistance to sex workers in distress,³ and to discern the complex and varied realities of selling sexual services.

‘The woman question’

By assuming a position of sympathy with the unfree and oppressed womanhood of India, the colonial mind was able to transform this figure of the Indian woman into a sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of a country. (Chatterjee [1993: 118])

The contemporary politics of sex work in India has grown out of a complex discourse on gender and nationalism in the region. India’s ‘unfreedom’ was evidenced by the status of its women, according to its colonial rulers, until India’s independence in 1947. Sati was the ostensible focus of this discourse during colonialism as the ultimate metaphor for women’s worth. However, the discourse on sati alone cannot account for the ways in which the perceived status of women was used to rationalize the colonial project. The regulation of women’s sexuality formed a core framework for colonialist discourses on Indian women. The debates on the age of marriage during the 1880s, along with the discussion of the representation of Indian women via criticisms of Katherine Mayo’s book Mother India (Mayo 1927), revolved around the ways in which women in India were victimized through regimes of power that controlled and commoditized female sexuality. The distance from child bride to prostitute, it seems, was relatively short in these debates.

Singling out Brahmin men and their laws for moral condemnation, [Katherine] Mayo also refused to make a distinction between the well-being of high- or low-caste women, insisting that in India, women were universally oppressed. Most shocking of all: she correlated prostitution with Hindu religious practice, alleging that high-caste wives with impotent husbands were sent to temples to be impregnated by priests, that young girls were bequeathed to priests as devadasis (whom she interpreted as prostitutes), and that the Indian widow ‘not seldom falls’ into prostitution. (Albinia 2005: 429)

If the idea of female prostitution in India serves as an allegory for India within the internationally hegemonic anti-trafficking framework, it is because this idea has helped to produce the rhetoric of Indian sociality for more than a century.

Trafficking and prostitution

While a complete discussion of the history and critiques of the discourse on human trafficking is far beyond the scope of this chapter, a discussion of the intersections between sex worker and feminist movements entails reviewing some of the critiques of human trafficking for two reasons. First, because human trafficking and prostitution are now being used as nearly interchangeable terms by humanitarian activists and lawmakers in western Europe and the USA, a semantic and political development that emerges from late-nineteenth-century concerns about ‘white slavery’ (Walkowitz 1992). This has had important consequences for how sex work is governed in the global South, and particularly in Asia, where US international policy on trafficking/prostitution has compelled some governments, e.g. in South Korea and Cambodia, to institute laws that seek to abolish prostitution altogether. Sex workers in those countries were summarily criminalized overnight, taken to prisons and remand homes, and stripped of their livelihoods (Globe News 2011; Thrupkaew 2009). Secondly, because the debate about legalizing, criminalizing or decriminalizing prostitution within national and international fora has been framed by the challenge of crafting appropriate state-sponsored solutions to address human trafficking, it becomes necessary to elaborate a brief genealogy of the globally hegemonic discourse on trafficking/prostitution, and the ways in which this discourse is linked with the histories of anti-prostitution and anti-pornography work within US feminism.

The challenge of the discourse on prostitution and human trafficking has been both compounded and produced by the ideological cast imbued in the terms ‘prostitution’, ‘trafficking’ and ‘sex work’. The definition of trafficking itself has been disputed among feminists on ideological grounds; feminists seeking the abolition of prostitution altogether have argued that, because prostitution is equivalent to violence against women, trafficking and prostitution are also equivalent terms. Non-abolitionist advocates have responded by insisting that the term ‘human trafficking’ should cover the forced movement of people across borders and long distances for any labour, and should not be primarily linked with prostitution.⁴ The current definition, contained within the ‘Palermo Protocol’,⁵ was a compromise between many different actors, but it does succeed in defining human trafficking according to the conditions by which people are transported for work, and not solely by the work for which they are transported, although the practice of anti-trafficking work still belies many of the long-standing disputes in definitions and emphases (Doezema 2002). Given the history of discourses of prostitution and trafficking, it is important to recall that the interest in and resources for anti-trafficking work did not emerge out of a vacuum, nor from an overbearing US governmental policy that was somehow apprehended globally. The contemporary international anti-trafficking development industry is the result of a complex interplay between and among the priorities of various social movements, and between those of social movements and governments.

History and feminism

In order to understand the current state of affairs surrounding the politics of sexual commerce in India, it is important to understand the role of policies originating from the USA in shaping the international discourse on sex-work-as-trafficking. The US government has been influential in asserting the conflation of prostitution and trafficking through its support of organizations domestically and internationally that espouse and work within this framework. This governmental priority has been built over time, in part through the convergence of the interests of the government in controlling illegal migration across all international borders, including human trafficking, and those of feminists in the USA who opposed prostitution, many of whom had earlier opposed pornography. In addition to offering a contemporary model for liberal feminist collaboration with the state, US feminist anti-pornography activists consolidated their positions on violence, gender and consent in an analysis of pornography that equated it with harm. Following the feminist debates on pornography in the 1980s, these positions re-emerged within the context of the discussion on ‘forced’ versus ‘voluntary’ sex work during the 1990s. The categories ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ were deployed during the debates on pornography, and have since been deployed in debates on the language that distinguishes ‘trafficking’ and sexual commerce in international human rights instruments. The assertion of these categories can be found in many key UN documents, including General Recommendation 19 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and in position papers and statements issued by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, as well as being found in the anti-trafficking protocol (the Palermo Protocol) itself.

Sex workers’ rights advocates have come to question the utility of the emphasis on ‘forced’ versus ‘chosen’ prostitution in furthering a progressive position on sex work within these debates. In particular, non-abolitionist advocates have argued that making this distinction leads to constituting two classes of sex workers: one, a ‘forced’ class that deserves legal protection, and another, a ‘voluntary’ class that does not. Jo Doezema has observed, ‘No international agreement condemns the abuse of human rights of sex workers who were not “forced”’ (Doezema 1998: 34). She cites two main reasons for this. The first is that, although prostitution is generally criminalized in law, there is no one clear response to ‘voluntary’ prostitution from feminists. The second is that, in respecting the right to self-determination for sex workers’ rights organizations to lobby for themselves, it is more feasible, in the terms of international law, to gain support for a negative rights claim: e.g. that a woman should be free from coerced prostitution, rather than arguing for a positive rights claim, e.g. the right to sell sexual services, while challenging the structures, institutions and people that may violate sex workers’ human rights.

The notion of two ‘classes’ of sex workers, as structured, for example, by the historically tenacious forced–voluntary dichotomy, can be used as an interpretive lens for thinking through the myriad ways in which sex workers are dyadically categorized as deserving/undeserving, moral/immoral and powerful/disempowered. The differential representation of sex workers in the global North and the global South is a critical vector for discerning the formation of these dyads and dichotomies in the discourse on sexual commerce. Considering the North/South politics of the discourse on prostitution provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which prostitution is, and has been, a racialized discourse, and to geopolitically situate the issues presented in this chapter.

Force, choice and race (and caste)

Historian Philippa Levine offers one trajectory for the racialization of prostitution, through the history of British colonialism in India. Discussing the nineteenth-century rise in official concerns about British soldiers having relationships with ‘native’ women in the colonies, including soldiers cohabiting with local women and having children with them, Levine argues that soldiers were encouraged to become clients of sex workers instead, a move which may have given rise to the brothel system in many places, including Bombay. Official concerns about white soldiers having sexual relationships with non-white women in the colonies coincided with the entrenchment of allopathic medicine, public health and humanitarian social work around this time. Given this nexus of emergent discourses,

The prostitute fulfilled a role as the most degraded of women, a polluted and despised wretch removed from decency but nonetheless providing a ‘necessary’ outlet. As masculine and feminine roles became more sharply defined in the nineteenth century and as fears of VD grew, the prostitute as a social problem acquired greater urgency. Weighted down with a confused medico-moral baggage tied to longstanding conceptions about gender, class, and race, prostitution symbolized difference. As such, it could also serve to yoke ‘lesser’ populations to ideas of sexual disorder, offering a veritable commentary on the savagery and barbarism of colonized peoples. (Levine 2003: 179)

The idea that sex workers in the British colonies represent that which is degraded, savage and barbaric dovetails with Chandra Mohanty’s argument in her famous essay ‘Under Western eyes’, first drafted during the early years of American ‘second wave’ feminism, on the cusp of the fissure in US feminism over pornography. Mohanty argues that the beginning of second-wave feminism in the West, e.g. from the late 1960s and early 1970s in the USA and the UK, was laced with the belief that women in the global South did not enjoy the same rights, freedoms or social movements that were available to women in the West. Mohanty argued that ‘third world women’ were constructed as ‘a homogeneous powerless group often located as implicit victims of particular socioeconomic systems’ (Mohanty 1991: 57). The contemporary aboli...