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Paper short abstract

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this account will position the work of collective making in sex worker networks in India alongside other labours in the lives of sex workers-productive, reproductive, and otherwise, to offer a counter-narrative to the sex-work-identity-morality nexus.

Paper long abstract

Sex worker collectives in India were created in the 1980s-1990s as AIDS response community healthcare projects. In recent years, these collectives have been formalising into Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) to advocate for sex workers’ socio-legal rights, decriminalisation, better working conditions, building cross-movement solidarities and unionisation efforts.

Few studies exist in India about local sex work activism (beyond sex and work itself) and collective identity formation in layered global-local contexts where sex workers work for global decriminalisation, with anti-racist, abolitionist movements, local and global workers’ movements, against poverty, all in the background of right-wing nationalism, among other crises.

The sex workers I work with contend with multiple identities- being women/transgender people/men who have sex with men, caste oppressed, as well as that of being “informal workers”. The labour of advocacy, community making, activism and ensuring a future for themselves lies in these multiple identities and negotiations that they have to use/deploy/employ based on the situation. The identity of the sex worker has both “freed” sex workers from previously stigmatising language, but also created an umbrella identity that has pushed different localised experiences into one identity marker. The paper will investigate what the work of sex worker activism based on this identity is, and the usefulness of identity markers in this context (following Dutta and Roy’s work on “Transgender”, and Boyce and Cataldo on “MSM”), to see how people negotiate identities; what they get to proudly use, and what they occupy even if they are barred from using it.