The material and the moral: contradictory imperatives and the production of trafficking narratives in South India

ABSTRACT

Transnational anti-trafficking networks seek to ‘rescue’ cisgender women who sell sex in India. This article puzzles out why cis female sex workers might narrate themselves as victims of trafficking in need of rescue despite making comfortable livings as independent sex workers who control their own labour. I draw data from my own ethnographic observations, interviews with 130 Telugu-speaking sex workers, as well as publicly circulating media clips, all from fieldwork conducted in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana between 2009 and 2018. The victim narratives analysed here were told by sex workers familiar with arguments in favour of decriminalising and destigmatizing sex work. My research suggests that many women who sell sex value the material goals of the sex workers’ rights movement while nevertheless longing for the immaterial moral security touted by anti-traffickers. I argue that publicly performing trafficking narratives allows women who sell sex to disavow moral agency in participating in what they often refer to as tappudu pani (bad work) while nevertheless accessing the material benefits of sex work. Participating in what Lindquist has called the aesthetic of trafficking, therefore, enables them to plead for sympathy from not only faceless donors but their own moral communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• trafficking narratives
• moral personhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names throughout are pseudonyms.

2 On 19 May 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that sex work per se it not criminalised under Indian law, and sex workers should not be unwillingly rescued by police (NNSWI 2022).

3 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this articulation of my central claim.

4 In a pan-India survey, Sahni and Shankar (2011) did not find Dalit women over-represented among sex workers. By contrast in a population-based sample of sex workers in Andhra Pradesh, Dandona et al. (2006) found Dalit women represented at twice their rate in the general population.

5 Sex workers have repeatedly pointed out that they do not sell their bodies but only their sexual services, belying the phrase ‘selling her body.’ Ironically, Cohen (2004) documented kidney donors – literal sellers of body parts – who gained ethical approval from Tamil hospital boards on the grounds that it would save them from selling sex.

6 Women considered themselves ‘coached’ when they adhered to explicit instructions regarding what to include and omit. I understand ‘coaching’ more broadly, including, for example, observations of other sex workers’ narratives.

7 I use a pseudonym for her here that is different than the one she used for herself on TV.

8 All of these labels were spoken as English loan words in the flow of Telugu.

9 Areas famous for their many training courses in software, hardware, and call centre-related skills, which are often sought out by upwardly mobile youth from working and middle-class backgrounds.

10 Something similar occurred at the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia (Marks 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago; National Science Foundation [grant number 1260520]; Committee on South Asian Studies, University of Chicago.

Notes on contributors

Kimberly Walters

Kimberly Walters is an associate professor of International Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination and the University of Chicago, Delhi Center. She has written in openDemocracy, Signs, Anthropological Quarterly, Economic & Political Weekly, AIDS Care, and in an edited volume, Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage Around the World (2023). She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, Rescued from Rights: Sex Work and the Humanitarian State in India.