Abstract:
Discourse on sex work and prostitution debate the question of choice and agency available to women while engaging in the sex industry. These debates inform laws and policies in countries on regulating and criminalizing the sex industry. Through an ethnography in Songachi, a red-light district in Kolkata, India, in this paper, I attempt to answer the question: why do women stay in prostitution even after they are no longer trafficked? To answer questions of agency and choice, it is imperative to examine the reasons that they stay. I argue that the stigma surrounding their work which reinforce the economic constraints they face, limit their agency and prevent them from leaving. At the same time, they do exercise limited agency over their lives and are able to make daily decisions within the red-light area. In an effort explicate the stigma and the way it came to exist in Indian society, I show how the category of women included in the term ‘prostitute’ changed during British rule. I also present the dominant discourses of sex work and prostitution: oppression and empowerment paradigms. Finding both insufficient to characterize the unique situation of prostitution in India, I propose that we employ a third new paradigm, the polymorphous paradigm, to understand prostitution in India.
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