‘We Are Mothers First’: Localocentric Articulation of Sex Worker Identity as a Key in HIV/AIDS Communication

Abstract

The connection between identity and health communication has been amply documented in communication research. How an individual frames oneself with respect to and in conjunction with one's interpersonal relationships and material and communicative structures shapes one's identity. This in turn shapes how one enacts the self, given the relationships and available contexts one is embedded in, all of which have a significant influence on how one communicates about and negotiates health and illness. This study reports the results of an ethnographic field study conducted during two periods—June and August 2007 and July and August 2009, which examined, chiefly through interviews of 46 participants, how members of a community of sex workers in Kalighat, in the city of Kolkata in India, communicatively constructed their selves with respect to their prevalent cultural indices and available structures, and how enunciations and enactments of sex worker selves as “mothers first” influenced localized patterns of HIV/AIDS communication and related work practices. Sex worker narratives suggested that mainstream assumptions and identity labels that depict sex workers as incapable mothers and the concurrent HIV/AIDS practices sex workers are asked to adopt need to be questioned and transformed to effect positive changes in health and HIV/AIDS negotiation practices among members of this marginalized community.

KEYWORDS:

• sex work
• HIV/AIDS
• health
• communication
• culture
• mothers

Notes

1. Context refers to the local and immediate surroundings within which cultural members make choices.

2. Mainstream and/or dominant ideology refers to Western (Euro-centered) understandings of what it means to be healthy, and how one should communicate about health and well-being. It alludes to the bio-medical model of health, where the focus is on the individual and how responsibility for one's health rests solely on the individual.

3. Kolkata is the capital city of the state of West Bengal in India. Bengali is the mother tongue of people who live in this state. People of the state are called Bengalis and the culture specific to the people in this state is (in generalized terms) referred to as Bengali culture.

4. Culture refers to the webs of local meanings that individuals and groups create through communication. Structures refer to resources, institutional forces that influence communication, health, and living contexts. Agency refers to the capacity of human beings to engage with structures that encompass their lives, to make meanings through this engagement, scripting texts of engagement with structures, living within these structures, and, at the same time, creating discursive openings to transform those structures (Dutta, 2008).

5. The culture-centered approach posits that health is communicated at the interstices of culture, structure and agency.

6. The DMSC is a sex-worker's union in Sonagachi, a red-light district in north Kolkata. The DMSC is in charge of running a HIV/AIDS program in the Sonagachi community and in other brothel-based sex worker communities in the state of West Bengal. DMSC also fights for sex workers rights across the country.

7. Localocentricity refers to a focus on communicative patterns that are local to a culture.

8. Instances exist of expert-driven health promotion efforts that are designed with marginalized communities. Notable in this context is the Sonagachi HIV/AIDS Intervention Programme (SHIP) initiated by a public health expert Dr. Samarjit Jana.

9. Goddess Kali, in Hinduism, symbolizes power or shakti.

10. Babus, in Bengali, refer to the regular clients of sex workers. They are also husbands (both official and unofficial) and live-in partners of sex workers, and often live in the house with the sex worker.

11. Narratives are stories of the self; they are stories that convey understandings of how individuals and collectives understand their culture, prevailing structures, and contextual modes of living (Dutta, 2008).

12. Names of research participants have been changed to maintain anonymity and participants mentioned in this paper are sex workers unless otherwise stated.