Oxford, UK; New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxxiv, 226 pp. US$28.86, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-947775-3.
The Gendered Proletariat is an in-depth and rigorous examination of the economic basis of sex work. The author, Swati Ghosh, adeptly draws on economic and deconstructionist frameworks to explore how we may consider sex work as a legitimate domain of labour. At the core of the analyses, as the title suggest, is the issue of gendered labour, and how that aligns with the larger picture of labour, which is supposedly gender neutral. Those of us who are familiar with the literature on sex work/prostitution, are keenly aware that the field—unlike any other—is steeply immersed in the debates around sex work as a form of labour, and prostitution as the paradigmatic example of patriarchal violence. Ghosh revisits this debate not to dwell on it but rather to point us to a very important gap in the literature, that is, what constitutes “work” has remained under-theorized. This approach is invaluable to examine sex work beyond the framework of the debate because it clearly does not capture the topic in all its nuances or as Ghosh puts it, “what is required is addressing the complexities of ‘work’ in sex work” (xxi). The book is structured in three parts: “Sex Work and Value”; “From Prostitution to Sex Worker: An Incomplete Revolution”; and “On the Question of Agency.”
Ghosh attentively locates the “work” within the larger legal framework of prostitution in India, where the law regarding such work is quite confounding. The primary law, the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act (ITPA) does not identify prostitution as illegal, but seeks to prevent trafficking. Trafficking is a criminal offense as is exploiting and living on the earnings of a prostitute. At the same time, sex work or sex workers do not appear in the legal framework, and sex workers are either designated as criminals or as victims. In this scenario the role of the state as the recognizer of sex work rights is often limited to HIV/AIDS prevention, and while there have been several attempts, the delineation of work in sex work has still not been addressed.
The highlight of this book is Ghosh’s specific entry into the topic of sex work as a form of “affective labour.” She draws on the neo-Marxian value frame as an analytic frame, but also complements it by drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstructionist approach in “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” (Diacritics 15, no. 4 [1985]: 73–93). Together, what we see is the framing of sex work as “labour-value,” which encapsulates work, a specific kind of work, primarily based on the body as the site of emotional labour. Ghosh contends that the transformation of the use-vale to abstract value of labour in the case of sex work is rather impossible. In other words, sex work is limited as concrete labour. The author stresses the “personal implication” (xxiv) of the buyer-seller dynamic, which is based on a relationship of power that leans towards the buyer.
The research is based in Sonagachi, the iconic red-light district in Kolkata, India. Ghosh, as she herself notes (xxxi), alternates between “prostitutes” and “sex workers” except for the third segment of the book “On the Question of Agency.” She explores two interrelated questions here: “on the possibility of agency in situations of subordination, and problematize agency as effect of collective action in one, and of individual decision-making in the other” (163). These questions are explored through two instances: first, the manifesto produced by the sex workers’ collective; and second, through the question of motherhood. The manifesto was drawn at the first National Conference of Sex Workers in India in 1997, and organized under the auspices of the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). The manifesto compares sex work to any other form of labour, and vehemently critiques the patriarchal framework that derecognizes women’s sexuality as pleasure-form. While on the topic of sexuality, the rather unavoidable topic is its relation with procreation and the exaltation of the family as the heteronormative institution. The manifesto clearly identifies sex workers as mothers and that their movement is not against family. However, it is an invitation to broaden the scope of sexuality beyond the domain of the family. Ghosh draws our attention to the obvious allusion to the Communist Manifesto, and focuses on “workers,” except that in 1848 it was embedded in class relations, and in 1997, it is embedded in patriarchy, both to be dismantled.
Historically, this is the first time we hear sex workers speak, as Ghosh herself notes, as both “utterance” and “text.” Likewise, she also recognizes the invaluable contribution the movement has made in the lives of the sex workers in Sonagachi. Here, however, one is left wondering about her transposable use of sex worker and prostitution. This issue is particularly relevant because the linguistic turn from prostitute to sex worker was critical for the movement, and the women identify as sex workers (jouno karmi). As to the question of motherhood, Ghosh accurately emphasizes single motherhood, which is a challenge but also an emotional anchor for the women. Nonetheless, here we do see a departure from the manifesto, since the women still see their single motherhood as a deficiency, and often enter into relationships with men as a semblance of heterosexual domesticity. The notion of the single mother, which carries extensive political connotations mainly in the Global North, seemed misplaced in the context of Sonagachi where the struggles of motherhood extends to bringing a pregnancy to term vis-à-vis livelihood.
The work is theoretically dense, and sometimes the language may seem inaccessible. However, its deep analyses of “work” will be of immense significance to economists as well as across disciplines and to scholars who are looking to move beyond the agency/choice binary in relation to sex work, and labour studies in general. Ghosh’s contribution is especially invaluable in offering an analytic window into collectivizations that take root outside and in spite of the hegemonic human rights narrative governed by the Global North.
Simanti Dasgupta
University of Dayton, Dayton, USA