Towards a Southern Approach to Sex Work

Lived Experience and Resilience in a Bangladeshi Brothel

Habiba Sultana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367359355
• eBook ISBN: 9781000334012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book delves into this almost unchartered territory, documenting the lived experiences of sex workers in Bangladesh, considering the complex realities of their day-to-day lives and the ways they negotiate their working conditions and relationships. Despite being the most common form of female deviance and criminality globally, we know very little about sex work in Asia and the global south. Drawing on feminist frameworks, it shows that the experiences of sex workers vary widely depending on the ways they enter the sex trade, their modes of operation, and relationships with significant others.

Towards a Southern Approach to Sex Work contributes to feminist scholarship on sex work, by offering a much needed southern perspective, drawing on culturally specific data. It argues that the lived experience of sex workers comprises both victimhood and agency, deception and resilience, and that it is the management of these relationships that enable sex works to avoid social marginalization and alienation.

An accessible and compelling read, this will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, gender studies, south Asian studies, cultural studies, social theory and policy makers. In addition, it will engage all those interested in learning more about how the sex trade operates in Bangladesh.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

Sex workers have been the subject of sustained interest in both feminist and epidemiological discourses, being variously presented as socially problematic. Feminism considers sex work to be an issue of debate, focusing on whether it should be understood as violence expressed as objectification, inequality, patriarchy, alienation, dissociation, or as a form of labor or occupation that involves skill. If the debate is simplified and generalized, it can be seen as polarized into two positions: considering sex workers to be either “victims” or “agents.” Belinda Carpenter (2000) argued:

It is apparent that current ways of knowing the prostitute, in mainstream and feminist theoretical conceptualizations and in popular discourse, centre upon the victim/agent dichotomy … Although prostitutes have often gained a speaking position through the work of feminists, feminists and prostitutes continue to experience an uneasy relationship. The source of uneasiness is the gap between the experience of prostitutes and feminists' theoretical conceptualizations of prostitutes. (125)

In Bangladesh, discourse over the issue of sex work is also divided. The state holds a moralistic attitude toward sex work. In spite of using the term “sex workers” or “Jouno Kormi”, the Department of Social Services describe sex work as despicable and immoral (Department of Social Services 2020, para 1). The Government of Bangladesh adopted a program called “Training and Rehabilitation of Socially Handicapped Girls” in 2002-2003 (Department of Social Services 2020, para 1). The socially handicapped girls are referred to as those who were engaged in immoral sex as a result of being victims of adverse situations, due to poverty, deception, coercion, helplessness or because of enticement of monetary or other gains (Department of Social Services 2020, para 4). In contrast to this moralistic position, a new language of rights cropped up during the 1990s. This perspective on sex workers' rights emerged during sex worker activism which began following a series of eviction threats between 1991 and 1999 (Azim 2012, 275–276). Through this activism sex workers highlighted themselves as workers and demanded recognition as legitimate citizens (Azim 2012, 275–276).

During this same period of time, non-government organizations (NGOs) were working on the issue of HIV (Chowdhury 2006, 340). These organizations, also referred to as development agencies, focused their work on raising awareness on the social and political rights of the sex workers (Chowdhury 2006, 340, 346). Chowdhury (2006, 340) notes:

Development agencies began focusing on sex workers as the most potent bearers of HIV disease. While focusing on this issue, they observed that, in order to control HIV/AIDS, a sex worker must have control over her body, yet the relative power base of male customers is higher than that of sex workers (Jana 2003). This realization motivated the development agencies to change their strategy from service delivery to capacity building in order to enable sex workers to address HIV/AIDS more effectively. The agencies began incorporating sex workers into various human development programs.

Through their programs on capacity building and empowerment, a number of international, national, and local NGOs started working sex worker's leadership and organization building (Chowdhury 2006, 340). The subtle assumption behind these initiatives was—if sex workers can assert rights over their bodies, they can play a role in HIV transmission, supporting the view that sex workers' bodies are diseased.

Even before the arrival of HIV, sex workers' bodies have long been seen as pollutants and vectors of pathogens. The British Contagious Diseases Acts, which were introduced in 1864, 1866, and 1869, identified sex workers as the polluters of the male body politic and classified sex workers' body as a site of disease (Bell 1994, 55). If found diseased, sex workers were subject to detention in certified lock hospitals for up to three months (Bell 1994, 56). These measures therefore support the view that sex workers are morally corrupt and are sources of biological contagion and venereal disease. Later on, when the HIV epidemic emerged in the mid-1980s, an association was drawn between sex work and HIV, and sex workers became identified as a “high-risk group” (Lyttleton 2000; Treichler 1999 quoted in Sandy 2014, 5). Sandy (2014, 6) argued:

The cultural legacy and historical genealogy of sex work in public health discourse meant that it was unsurprising that sex workers were labelled as a “high-risk group” in HIV discourse. The concept of HIV “risk groups” was developed by epidemiologists working in the field of public health and centred on the idea that reported HIV infections could be separated into groups of people based on risk factors. Entire populations were designated as “risk groups” that featured the usual suspects (sex workers, drug users, gay men).

This discourse of risk also applies to Bangladesh. For example, the 3rd National Strategic Plan for HIV and AIDS Response (2011–2015) uses terms such as “high-risk groups” and “most at-risk populations” (MARPs) to refer to sex workers and other groups (NASP n.d., 10). It identifies certain groups such as female and male sex workers and their clients, injecting drug users, males who have sex with males, and transgender people as MARPs for their relatively higher risk of HIV transmission (NASP n.d., 24–25). Likewise, development agencies have also considered sex workers to be the most potent bearers of HIV (Chowdhury 2006, 340).

Feminist engagement with sex workers and HIV

Contemporary feminist historians claim that in the 19th century, feminist engagement with “prostitutes and prostitution” occurred against the backdrop of mobilization against the Contagious Diseases Acts (Carpenter 2000, 35). The acts were challenged by a coalition of feminists, middle-class nonconformists, and radical working-class men who called for its repeal in 1870 (Walkowitz 1980, 124–125). Josephine Butler (1896) began a social purity campaign referred to as the abolitionist crusade (quoted in McGibben 1995, 40), and rejected the prevailing social view that “fallen women” are pollutants of men (Walkowitz 1980, 124–125). The movement was grounded on the ideology that women are essentially moral and spiritual creatures who need protection from “carnal” men, who are essentially animalistic (Walkowitz 1980 quoted in McGibben 1995, 46). Grounding their position on the Victorian-gendered moral framework, and the evoking rhetoric and ideology of Christian evangelism, they demanded an equal standard of sexual morality (Attwood 2010, 71, 73) and elimination sexual double standards. They argued that the Contagious Diseases Acts validated men's sexual access to a class of “fallen women,” by suggesting penal actions against women and not against men for the same vice (Walkowitz 1982, 80). By their demand for elimination of sexual double standards, they did not mean that they wanted women to make independent choices about their sexuality (Attwood 2010, 83–84). Josephine Butler's endorsement of women over their bodies was rather embedded in domestic ideology (Attwood 2010, 86–87). Butler and her followers also wanted to direct male sexuality to procreation, so that a state of moral order based on Christian social purity could be achieved, in which sex work had no place (Attwood 2010, 83–84, 95).

During the second wave of feminism, the focus of the women's movement shifted toward the liberation of women's sexuality (Sawer 2013, 9). Demand for civil liberties, economic opportunities, and sexual freedom for women found their way into the demands of a generation of feminists around the 1960s, who regarded these issues to be crucial for complete liberation (Tong 2009, 23). In the 1970s, when the sexual revolution was well under way, groups of sex workers across the United States established loose organizations (Ditmore 2010, 107). This was the origin of the contemporary sex workers' rights movement (Ditmore 2010, 107). Recognition of sex workers as legitimate service workers, and not as sex slaves or social deviants, emerged in the 1970s (Chapkis 1997, 70). Terms such as “sex work” and “sex workers” were introduced by sex workers to move away from definitions that ascribe social or psychological features to a class of women, and to instead recognize commercial sex as generating income; that is, a form of employment (Bindman and Doezema 1997 quoted in Sullivan 2003, 71). Grounding their argument on the liberal framework, both Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) and the Canadian Organization for Rights of Prostitutes (CORP) put forward the argument that expression of sexuality and the use of bodies as one sees fit should be permissible for both men and women (Freeman 1997, 217, 224).¹ Such propositions received criticism from organizations such as Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt (WHISPER) (Hobson 1990, 221–222). WHISPER argues that a mythology of “liberal lies” has been constructed by the sex workers' rights movement (Giobbe 1990 quoted in E. Jeffreys 2004, 75). Differences in views on sex work among feminists gave rise to different political demands, which includes criminalization of clients in Sweden and in Finland, legalization of brothels in Netherlands, and regulation of sex work as labor in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory in Australia (Outshoorn 2004, 6).

In the developing countries, the sex workers' movement became an evolving phenomenon in the 1990s because concern over the HIV/AIDS epidemic was growing during this period of time (Chowdhury 2006, 340).² Kempadoo (2003, 147) notes:

The lack of Third World sex worker representation in the international arena began to be redressed in the 1990s, as the international AIDS conferences provided a new opportunity for sex workers to get together … Under-funded sex worker organizations in both the First and Third Worlds who would have been hard-pressed to persuade their funders of the necessity of sending a representative to a “whores' conference” found it easier to get money when public health was, supposedly, at stake. Thus, the AIDS conferences provided a platform for a revitalization of the international movement, and, for the first time, signaled the presence of Third World sex workers as equal participants in the international scene.

As a result of their participation in international gatherings on epidemic control, sex worker groups in developing countries came into repeated contact with each other, resulting in facilitation of their mobilization (Kempadoo 1998 quoted in Kotiswaran 2011, 9). Ditmore (2010) argued that in spite of the fact that some good programs were created due to available funding on HIV prevention, one effect of it was that such funding influenced what direction the sex workers' organizations would move toward (111).

A shift therefore can be seen in the activism surrounding sex work. While 19th-century feminists had the idea of rescue and rehabilitation of sex workers so that these women could be brought into the purview of womanly dignity and virtue (see Sandy 2014, 14), a change in perspective in terms of “sex as work” became evident during the second wave feminism. When sex workers are understood as “victims,” they are denied the possibility of exercising their agency. On the contrary, when seen as agents, the experiences of violence and abuse of those who are trafficked and forced to trade sex as bonded women, are not given attention. This dichotomous construction of sex workers is reductionist and essentialist. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop frameworks for explaining the experiences of sex workers, taking into account their continuum of experiences, multiple subjectivities, and negotiations in day-to-day lives. This book locates the mundane voices of the sex workers of Bangladesh to understand their experiences, relationships, desires, meanings assigned to work, and understanding of risk.

Objectives

The objective of this book is to understand the culture-specific lived experience of sex workers, their understanding of risk, and the ways feminism can be used to understand those experiences. In doing so, it aims to seek answer to the following questions:

1. What are the lived experiences of sex workers in a Bangladeshi brothel?
2. How their experiences are shaped by the organization of the brothel and the broader structural factors and gender norms?
3. How do sex workers understand risk?
4. How can feminist literature be used to understand brothel-based sex work in Bangladesh?

Southern perspective

In seeking the answer of the above questions, this book finds Connell's (2007) Southern Theory useful. In Southern Theory, Connell argues, social science represents the worldviews of metropolitan societies as universal (Connell 2007, viii). In general, in the production and circul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Status of women and sex workers in Bangladesh
• 3 Feminism and sex work
• 4 Global sex work: The North and the South
• 5 Entry and modes of sex work
• 6 Work and pleasure
• 7 Mothers and daughters
• 8 Risk and violence
• 9 Conclusion
• Index