Open AccessOf Raids and Returns: Sex work movement, police oppression, and the politics of the ordinary in Sonagachi, India
Author(s) -
Simanti Dasgupta
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
anti trafficking review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2287-0113
pISSN - 2286-7511
DOI - 10.14197/atr.201219128
Subject(s) - oppression , grassroots , politics , subversion , gender studies , state (computer science) , sociology , criminology , sex work , law , political science , algorithm , computer science , medicine , family medicine , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv)
Drawing on ethnographic work with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a grassroots sex worker organisation in Sonagachi, the iconic red-light district in Kolkata, India, this paper explores the politics of the detritus generated by raids as a form of state violence. While the current literature mainly focuses on its institutional ramifications, this article explores the significance of the raid in its immediate relation to the brothel as a home and a space to collectivise for labour rights. Drawing on atyachar (oppression), the Bengali word sex workers use to depict the violence of raids, I argue that they experience the raid not as a spectacle, but as an ordinary form of violence in contrast to their extraordinary experience of return to rebuild their lives. Return signals both a reclamation of the detritus as well as subversion of the state’s attempt to undermine DMSC’s labour movement.