Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2014. xviii, 258 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$89.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-823-5689-9; US$24.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8223-5698-1.
Mumbai’s Kamathipura, Asia’s largest red-right district, is shrinking in the face of neighbourhood gentrification, and political haggling over prime land to accommodate housing and industrial projects in Mumbai. The area is vulnerable to excessive regulation from the police and interventionist NGOs, as well as to unannounced demolitions instigated by builders and bureaucrats. Daya, a brothel owner, sat with the book’s author, Svati Shah, and pointed to Kamathipura’s Thirteenth Lane. It was early evening, and instead of brightly dressed sex workers waiting for customers, the lane was filled with young men chatting and playing music. An exasperated Daya said: “What do you expect to do for the women now. There are no women. Look at this lane—there are only men, living seventeen to a room” (183). The decline of this red-light district has made the lives of its sex workers unstable in terms of access to housing, water, and social support, which in turn has impacted the kin networks dependent on the women for material sustenance. According to Daya, most dhanda (sex work) now happens in private apartments, five-star hotels and bars, and Mumbai’s infamous red-light district is no longer an alluring site for solicitation. This gripping dialogue is captured eloquently in Svati Shah’s timely book Street Corner Secrets. Daya’s lament illustrates the essence of the author’s journey through multiple spaces in Mumbai, where sex work is intimately related to women’s diminishing access to informal wages and basic infrastructural facilities.
Shah’s critical ethnography, an apt tribute to William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Societies (1943), analyzes how rural female migrants in the city negotiate sexual services as one of many strategies for gaining a livelihood. These low-caste migrants are from economically deprived and drought-prone districts of India. Most women drift in and out of the urban workforce to escape poverty, caste discrimination, and the unavailability of agricultural work, in the hope of better earnings, schooling, and potable water in the city. Using multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, Shah persuasively argues that these female migrants turn to a range of legitimized and stigmatized activities while maneuvering through Mumbai’s casual labour sector.
According to Shah, prostitution is produced spatially in this search for economic survival in the city. The author states that “the production of public space in Mumbai must be understood in relation to discourses and histories of the urban geographies of sexual commerce” (4). She focuses on three primary field sites: the brothel, the street, and the wage labour market in Mumbai (known as a naka), where sexual commerce is solicited discreetly alongside other income-generating activities. A naka forms for a period of time in an outdoor space, where 150 to 200 people gather every day to seek contracts for manual labour in construction work. Yet spatial order is maintained within the chaos of vehicular and pedestrian traffic through people sitting in caste, kin, and gendered clusters. Shah observes that solicitation in the naka is less visible than in a brothel or on the street, even though the use of unemployed women from the naka in sex work is common knowledge. The strength of the naka ethnography lies in “the questions of unspeakability” (111) raised by the author. For example, workers use metaphors such as bura kaam (bad work), jawani loot liya(snatched her youth), and faltu baat (offensive language) to refer to women’s immorality. Unlike the brothel, a space historically designated for sex work, a culture of disapproval exists around naka women’s unethical use of public space meant for procuring legitimate work. And this subtle shaming of their transgression is critiqued by women labourers who do sex work to fill their bellies (pet ke liye), and avoid sitting at home hungry with their honour (izzat) intact.
The author creatively unpacks the politics of public space by exploring further the regulation of sex work on a busy street near a commuter railway station, and in Kamathipura. Her study highlights the role of the local police and shop merchants in sporadically harassing street-based sex workers in an effort to keep commercial areas safe for middle-class families. While women in Kamathipura receive important education from HIV prevention drives, they also remain fairly defenseless against aggressive developers, and police raids prompted by anti-trafficking NGOs. The author’s bold allusion to the flow of international researchers with their predictable questionnaires gathering stale data on poverty and sex work is an intriguing slice of life from Kamathipura. Shah argues that erratic policing by both the state, and people with moral and institutional authority against sexual commerce, puts forward a convoluted interpretation of citizenship and criminality. Migrant prostitutes are subsequently characterized as diseased encroachers in the global city. Despite the wide acknowledgement of their vulnerability, they are not recognized as a population to be protected (but rather protected against) within Mumbai’s drive towards unfettered modernity.
Street Corner Secrets rounds off by underlining the significance of representing sex workers through their multiple subjectivities: of migrant, slum dweller, construction worker, and sex worker. This complicates the nature of women’s agency, and the book convincingly contests gender analyses of sex work through choice/force binary frameworks. Shah has an experimental, expressive, and empirical style of writing. But the narratives of the chapters are slightly uneven: they move between a focus on the abstract dialectics of space and complex discourse analysis, and the stark worlds of women sex workers being solicited by drunks. Short and succinct theoretical explanations would have enhanced the fascinating ethnography. I was unsure why several vernacular words like naka were italicized in some paragraphs and not in some others. Overall, this book’s ethnography makes a vibrant contribution to urban anthropology. Crafting an understanding of sexual labour that reflects the intricacies of rural-urban migration, the book sheds light on the management of knowledge around sex work, from secrecy to the rehabilitation of “rescued” prostitutes, and shows how spaces occupied by women sex workers have multiple uses and meanings in Mumbai’s contested urban landscape.
Atreyee Sen
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
pp. 470-472