Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon ethnographic work in Sonagachhi, this paper explores how the colonial and the postcolonial legal practices around prostitution/sex work resonate in terms of creating and recreating the women’s identity at the intersection of law and medicine and the resistance such practices evoke.

Paper long abstract:

One can trace the emergence of the prostitute as a medico-legal subject category since the mid- to late nineteenth century during the British colonial rule in India. The Contagious Diseases Acts medically isolated and legally marked women to particularly serve the British soldiers. In the postcolonial phase, with the advent of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the state has renewed its medical surveillance in the red light districts through intervention programs to prevent the spread of the disease. An uncanny continuity between the two historical periods is palpable.

Interestingly, in the midst of the postcolonial state recreating the prostitute as a new subject of rule through medico-legal supervision, what has emerged in response, is a sex workers' movement in Sonagachhi. The movement, which is primarily led by Durbar Mahila Samanawaya Samiti, a grassroots collective, aims to separate "prostitution" from trafficking since they are historically collated under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act. The goal of the movement is to replace the stigmatized label of "prostitution" with the empowerment of "sex work" with a view to establish labor rights.

Drawing upon current ethnographic work in Sonagachhi, this paper highlights two issues: first, how the colonial and the postcolonial legal practices resonate in terms of creating and recreating the women's bodily identity at the intersection of law and medicine. Second, how the current sex-work discourse lays claim to a new legal citizen-labor category. Together, these issues indicate state and citizen/subject formation in the postcolonial phase through claim making that emerges from the social margins.