Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi: Simanti Dasgupta

Simanti Dasgupta is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the International Studies Program at the University of Dayton. Her overarching interest in the politics of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial and neoliberal nation-states link her works. She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi, India, based on her ethnographic research with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers’ collective, since 2011. She published this work in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Anti-Trafficking Review, Opendemocracy:Beyond trafficking and slavery and The Conversation. She previously authored BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), which examined the emerging neoliberal politics in urban India at the intersection of Information Technology and water privatization. She can be reached at sdasgupta1@udayton.edu.

Prophylactic Rights examines the emergence of the sex work labour subjectivity at the intersection of two state surveillance regimes: HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking. It draws on ethnographic work since 2011 with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex workers' collective in Sonagachi. In 1992 the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health identified sex workers as a High-Risk Group and launched the Sexually Transmitted Diseases/HIV Intervention Project (SHIP) in Sonagachi. SHIP recruited sex workers as peer-educators to introduce others to the etiology of HIV/AIDS and promote the condom as the prophylactic device. In addressing structural barriers –poverty and stigma –SHIP achieved remarkable success in reducing new HIV infections through the sustained use of condoms. More importantly, SHIP extended the prophylactic narrative beyond public health to emphasize the threat the virus posed to the labour and livelihood of the women. The rearticulation of HIV/AIDS as a question of the labouring body that is worthy of rights, was unprecedented in Sonagachi. It motivated the peer educators to establish Durbar in 1995 as a collective to demand sex work rights and juridically delink it from trafficking. The existing literature posits both sex work and sex workers as a priori categories, when the categories themselves are relatively new in Sonagachi. This project examines how the labor narrative emerges in dissociation from ‘prostitution’ and how ‘prostitutes’ come to inhabit the worker position. I argue that for labor to emerge as a political category, the women submitted to HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking surveillances, while also subverting them with resistive connotations. In formulating what I term, the ‘medicolegal unstable’, I further show that the struggle for labor rights in such instances of historical marginalization, is characteristically uneven, that is, advances in HIV/AIDS prevention and related health rights of sex workers are often undermined by regressive anti-trafficking laws.