Everyday violence and care: insights from fictive kin relations between madams and sex workers in India

ABSTRACT

This article intervenes in the globally polarised terrain of debates on violence and agency in sex work. With a critical eye on how developmentalism governs these debates, the article explores fictive kin relations between women in Sonagachi, a prominent red-light area in Eastern India. Through an analysis of ethnographic observations and life-history interviews among madams and sex workers across three brothel households, this article argues that the configuration of ‘family-like’ relationships needs to be understood against a backdrop of what ‘family’ implies for socio-economically marginalised women who sell sex in urban India. Specifically, experiences of choice and coercion within these relationships are predicated on how madams and sex workers respond to kosto, a vernacularised articulation of everyday violence in each other’s lives, through jotno or care. Through this, the article sheds light on everyday forms of harm and solidarity between women in a red-light area, challenging institutionalised exceptionalisms of violence within sex work.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence
• care
• sex work
• India
• choice
• coercion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Earthen cups often used by street vendors to sell tea to customers in Bengal.

2 All names of research participants have been changed to protect anonymity and confidentiality.

3 Dasgupta (2018) argues that this casts them into a particular kind of hypervisibility as ‘risky bodies’, which generates reluctance to exhibit positive health-seeking behaviour (e.g., collecting blood test results) due to stigma borne from this hypervisibility.

4 All ages were self reported.

5 It was commonplace for sex workers to refer to madams as didi directly. This denoted the gap in age between them as madams tended to be older. When the age gap was non-existent, it was used to denote hierarchy. When they referred to madams in third person, maalkin (owner/mistress) was often used to denote both the madam’s status as head of the household and direct relationship with landlord.

Additional information

Funding

The research in this paper was funded by a PhD Internationalisation Studentship, provided by the Social Sciences Faculty at the University of East Anglia.

Notes on contributors

Mirna Guha

Mirna Guha is a political sociologist and intersectional scholar. Her research specialisms include gender violence, gender inequalities and social (in)justice. She is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in International Development from the University of East Anglia. Dr Guha’s doctoral research examined everyday violence in the lives of marginalised women selling sex in India. She is currently leading an impact evaluation of a regionally pioneering domestic abuse service provision for Asian women in East England and is passionate about amplifying the voices of marginalised women to inform sustainable anti-violence interventions and policymaking globally.