“HIV Is Our Friend”: Prostitution, Biopower, and the State in Postcolonial India

Author(s): Chaitanya Lakkimsetti

Source: Signs , Vol. 40, No. 1 (Autumn 2014), pp. 201-226
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676898

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Signs

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Chaitanya Lakkimsetti

“HIV Is Our Friend”: Prostitution, Biopower, and the

State in Postcolonial India

I n March 2006, four thousand sex workers from sixteen states in India
marched to the Indian Parliament to protest proposed new amendments to
the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act ðITPAÞ. If passed, the amendments
would have criminalized clients and defined all forms of prostitution as sex-
ual exploitation. These sex workers protested that the amendments would
interfere with the HIV/AIDS prevention work they were undertaking,
threaten their livelihoods, and make them more vulnerable to violence
and disease. The protestors demanded to be included in making decisions
about laws and policies with implications for their lives and work. Respond-
ing to their protest, the Indian government appointed a committee to hold
broad-based deliberations on the issue. By March 2007, sex workers and their
advocates had fostered major disagreements about the amendment among
various ministries of the Indian state, and the legislation stalled.
The protestors’ success raises two questions. First, how did a group of
women that has been heavily criminalized and stigmatized become so ca-
pable of making demands on the state that they could insist on being in-
volved in its decision-making process? Second, why did the Indian state take
the women’s demands seriously?
At first glance, this development might seem to be a straightforward
example of sex workers’ empowerment, that is, a result of sex workers’ col-
lective mobilization and organizing. I argue, however, that the civic power
demonstrated by the sex workers’ public mobilization is also related to a
wider shift in the modalities of state power in the late 1990s. Michel Fou-
cault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality are helpful in under-
standing both the political claims that sex workers make and the contra-
dictions of governance that managing populations with high or rising levels
of HIV infection create for states. The postcolonial Indian state confronted
a contradiction between two significant mandates: its ongoing regulation
of prostitution to secure social and sexual order and its emergent respon-

I thank Myra Marx Ferree, Hae Yeon Choo, Mary Hawkesworth, and the four anonymous
reviewers of Signs, as well as Jane Collins, Gay Seidman, Ayesha Khurshid, Afsaneh Najmabadi,
Jyoti Puri, and Wendy Christensen for their valuable feedback. This project received financial
support from the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant in Law & Soci-
ety and the American Sociology Association’s Martin P. Levine Memorial Dissertation Award.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2014, vol. 40, no. 1]
© 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2014/4001-0017$10.00

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
202 y Lakkimsetti

sibility to “protect life” by inculcating sexual health practices that would

successfully control the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These disjunctures opened
up discursive spaces for sex workers in India to demand rights and recog-
nition by basing their demands on the management of life as a responsi-
bility that they now shared with the state.
Based on my analysis of legal and policy documents and my ethnographic
study of the movement and the state as sites of contestation, I argue that
HIV/AIDS work and the associated mobilization of sex workers reflect a
new modality of citizenship for sex workers in India. First, as subjects of these
new biopower projects of the state and transnational NGOs, sex workers
became capable of making claims on the state. Earlier modes of state regu-
lation understood the prostitute as their object and attempted to control
social disorder by treating prostitutes either as culpably criminal or as inno-
cent victims of trafficking. But the transnational concern about the HIV/
AIDS epidemic introduced new technologies and discourses around sexu-
ality, bodies, and populations. These technologies of power—biopower—
emphasize the identification, classification, and surveillance of bodies for
disease prevention and require the active participation of sex workers, as
individuals and a community, in the management of the epidemic. The
state’s need to bring sex workers into these projects transformed their rela-
tionship with the state and allowed sex workers to make effective claims of
the state.
Opportunity is, therefore, not the whole story. The sex workers
themselves seized upon the strategies and technologies of biopower to
formulate their own needs and demands and to challenge state power over
them. As a public health expert told me in an interview, sex workers say,
“HIV is our friend.” Concern about the epidemic encouraged the state to
recognize sex workers as useful to its projects, encouraged sex workers to
make self-conscious claims to citizenship rights, divided state agencies and
their modes of governance, and weakened the state’s ability to ignore the
substantial public protest the sex workers mobilized. The protests halted
the proposed amendments, which then lapsed in Parliament in 2009. It
remains uncertain whether the amendments will ever be reintroduced.

Prostitution, public health, and regulation of bodies

Explorations of the state’s role in regulating disease and prostitution have
figured prominently in transnational feminist scholarship on nineteenth-
century Britain and its colonies.1 The earliest state regulation of prosti-

1
See Walkowitz ð1980Þ, Burton ð1992Þ, Levine ð2000Þ, and Tambe ð2009Þ.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 203

tution in India dates back to the 1860s, when the British colonial state
introduced the Contagious Diseases Act ðCDAÞ, in response to fears of
increasing venereal diseases among British soldiers stationed in the col-
ony. The CDA instituted compulsory medical examinations, registration,
and licensing of so-called public women and restricted the mobility of
prostitutes who had venereal diseases ðBurton 1992; Levine 2000Þ. Em-
phasizing regular examinations and medical detention, these policies as-
sumed a direct relationship between female sexual activity and disease
transmission, thus inscribing the status of prostitutes in discourse and
law as vectors of disease as well as unruly and dangerous subjects ðLevine
2000Þ.
The CDA came under severe attack from various quarters, including
British neoabolitionists such as Josephine Butler ðWalkowitz 1980Þ. But-
ler’s campaign and subsequent mobilizations forced the British to with-
draw the act, first in Britain in 1880 and then in 1886 in India. Transnational
feminist scholars argue that these colonial policies were rooted not only in
Victorian understandings of women’s sexuality but also in discourses of ra-
cial superiority and empire, which made the British colonial state’s approach
to prostitution fragmented and contradictory ðLevine 2000; Tambe 2009Þ.
While the British colonial state was invested in strictly regulating brothels
in the metropolis, it was actually promoting brothels and red light districts
for the service of British soldiers in its colonies ðGhosh 2005; Tambe 2009Þ.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has also spurred transnational feminist ex-
aminations of the intersections between bodily regulations, sexuality, and
the state ðGhosh 2005; Kapur 2005; Tambe 2009Þ. The advent of HIV/
AIDS re-marked sex workers’ bodies as diseased and subjected them to
increased surveillance. Sex workers’ bodies also became conflated with the
nation, seen as invaded by foreign powers and infected with a deadly virus
ðLaw 2001Þ. The AIDS pandemic thus meant an upsurge in interest in sex
workers in the developing world, which in some cases led to repressive
measures against sex workers but also provided an opportunity for sex
workers to organize ðKempadoo 2005b; Longo 2005; Tandia 2005Þ. Re-
search has noted the creation of sex workers’ political organizations in Thai-
land, the Philippines, Senegal, and India—sites where sex workers’ owner-
ship in prevention programs has been consciously included.2 In some
cases, sex workers have transformed HIV/AIDS intervention programs
and may even run these programs through so-called community-led in-
terventions ðLaw 2001; Kempadoo 2005aÞ.

2
See Misra, Mahal, and Shah ð2000Þ, Law ð2001Þ, Kempadoo ð2005aÞ, and Gupta et al.
ð2008Þ.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
204 y Lakkimsetti

Lisa Law’s ð2001Þ study Sex Work in Southeast Asia examines the emer-
gence of a sex worker subject through AIDS education activities. Law ar-
gues that the global discourse on HIV/AIDS and the introduction of peer
education in Southeast Asia have significantly shifted official attitudes re-
garding prostitution and now offer a foundation on which a new sex worker
subjectivity might emerge ð2001, 126Þ. A broad sense that there is a con-
nection between the AIDS epidemic and sex workers’ renewed subjectivi-
ties in the global South is found in these activist studies, which focus on
membership in HIV/AIDS prevention programs and the everyday negotia-
tions among sex workers, clients, and social agencies.
Swati Ghosh ð2005Þ points to the broad mobilization of sex workers
for recognition and redistribution but then separates HIV/AIDS-associated
mobilizations from such political assertions, arguing that sex workers are
being used as instruments of the state’s neoliberal “watch-care” system
ð2005, 55Þ and subordinated to the state’s regulation, supervision, and
control. While this framework might explain the manner in which the In-
dian state has approached sex workers in the earlier stage of the epidemic,
it does not explain the changing relationship between the state and sex
workers made evident by the protests of sex workers. I argue that the state
and sex workers are in a more complex relationship in these HIV/AIDS
projects, with power not only in the hands of the state. As new categories
of subjects, sex workers’ political communities are not only formed in in-
teractions with the state and transnationally driven projects but are also
active agents in molding and reshaping state concerns. The political con-
testations that these HIV/AIDS projects trigger are significant moments
during which sex workers emerge as subjects.
My study builds on this scholarship and explores politicized subjectivities
in the time of AIDS. I connect local processes of negotiation with broader
demands for legal rights and citizenship claims. I argue that these programs
mobilize women through the micropolitical processes underlying both sex
workers’ changed subjectivity and political claims for citizenship. My under-
standing of the shifts in the technologies of regulation produced by the
HIV/AIDS epidemic rests on Foucault’s concepts of biopower and gov-
ernmentality. I deploy these concepts to understand both how project ac-
tivities incorporate previously stigmatized communities into their manage-
ment and how these more empowered subjects, the sex workers, in turn
insert themselves into these projects to appropriate them for their own ends.

Biopower, the state, and marginalized groups in India

Foucault ð1978Þ introduced the idea of biopower to analyze a historical
shift in modern states’ exercise of power. He argues that new modalities of

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 205

power began to emerge in Europe in the eighteenth century, when the

emphasis of modern states shifted from controlling territory to control-
ling populations. Once birth rates became important to the functioning
of modern states, sex became an object of state interest, both as a means
to control territory and sovereignty and as an object of regulation in its
own right. Foucault ð1978, 1991Þ presents sex as a site for the elabora-
tion of state power.
Biopower is Foucault’s term for the ways that governments have increas-
ingly assigned themselves this duty of regulating bodies and managing po-
pulations. Through biopower, individual bodily discipline is combined with
the regulation of biological processes, such as maternity, mortality, sickness,
and health. Governmentality is Foucault’s term for the ensemble of insti-
tutions, procedures, calculations, and tactics that allow the modern state
to exercise power outside its formal structures ðFoucault 1978Þ. Govern-
ing modern societies involves a multitude of actors and entities, includ-
ing politicians, philanthropists, state bureaucrats, and medical experts. I
deploy these concepts of biopower and governmentality to connect the
interests that states and transnational actors have in regulating and dis-
ciplining bodies in order to encourage safe sexual practices among “high-
risk” groups.
Feminist and postcolonial critiques of Foucault have significantly chal-
lenged and extended Foucault’s work to consider specific gendered sub-
jectivities and non-Western and postcolonial contexts.3 Moreover, Partha
Chatterjee’s work on India has emphasized that “governmentality always
operates on a heterogeneous social field, on multiple population groups, and
with multiple strategies” ð2006, 60Þ. In postcolonial India, most residents
are only tenuously and contextually considered rights-bearing citizens, Chat-
terjee argues, and hence are only marginally drawn into the disciplinary
projects of the state. These subjects are not completely ungoverned, but
Chatterjee claims that their relationship with the state falls outside the
formal practices of law characteristic of civil society. Instead, urban squat-
ters, landless people, refugees, and others have been negotiating with the
state from a position of political dependence, citing the government’s ob-
ligation to look after the poor and needy, making a moral appeal as com-
munities that are striving to build a decent social life. These negotiations
by marginalized groups through informal and extra legal means, as Chat-
terjee indicates, make them political communities, in contrast to mere
populations, which are enumerated for the bureaucratic functions of the
state. Chatterjee’s framework offers a way to think about the democratic

3
See Stoler ð1995Þ, Butler ð1996Þ, Fraser ð1996Þ, and Hekman ð1996Þ.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
206 y Lakkimsetti

struggles of marginalized and deprived groups that are usually not visible
in the realm of civil society.
By including sex workers in this framework, I add nuance to Chatter-
jee’s theorization of citizenship at the margins of civil society, where sex
workers’ abject status places them. On one hand, because of their status
as criminal subjects, sex workers are placed outside the formal gover-
nance structures of civil society and the biopower it can offer. Tellingly,
sex workers have not been even peripherally part of any welfare prog-
rams of the Indian state ðKapur 2005Þ. On the other hand, they are sub-
ject to the state’s juridical surveillance. In fact, the state’s presence is per-
vasive in their lives as they constantly negotiate their status of illegality
and stigma with the police. These marginalized forms of interaction with
the state often take the form of bribing, complying with coercive sexual
demands to avoid arrest, shifting areas of operation in order to avoid ex-
tended police surveillance, and forming communication networks with
other sex workers and pimps so as to avoid the police ðJamı̄la and Devika
2007; Kotiswaran 2011Þ. It is thus remarkable that the visibility of sex
workers as a group that is capable of negotiating life and livability with
the state is happening precisely at the moment when their bodies are
under intense surveillance. I deploy biopower as an analytical tool to bring
sex workers’ subject formation and political resistance, as well as the frag-
mentary nature of the state, into the same analytical field. I argue that
their empowerment is not merely a matter of changed subjectivities but
is also a way in which governmentality alters power relations, putting sex
workers in a contradictory position and changing how the state responds
to their claims.
In addition to seeing HIV/AIDS programs as extending beyond the
state to transnational actors, I emphasize that the state is not a monolithic
institution. State regulatory strategies often contain gaps and contradic-
tions, making the state a productive site of power and meaning for citi-
zens ðFerguson and Gupta 2005; Kim-Puri 2005Þ. Thus, I understand the
state as an intricate web of discourses, social actors, and institutions ðBern-
stein and Schaffner 2005Þ that often contradict one another. “The state”
itself becomes more obviously fragmentary as its different agencies and
actors align with other interests. The transnational urgency to implement
effective responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic is one such critically im-
portant interest that produces disjunctures within the state, particularly
with regard to the regulation of prostitution. Moreover, the focus on the
uneven and contradictory demands that HIV/AIDS places on the state’s
own approach to prostitution enables a better understanding of how spe-

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 207

cific forms of resistance among marginalized women emerge in this par-

ticular historical context.

Methods and context

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in New Delhi,
India, from December 2006 to December 2007 and May to July 2009.
I attended and took field notes on national-level consultations on HIV
and the law, national meetings organized by sex workers, and local sex
worker mobilizations in several sites. Using a combination of snowball
sampling and theoretical sampling, I conducted thirty semistructured in-
terviews with activists and nongovernmental organization ðNGOÞ actors
ðincluding sex workersÞ, lawyers, representatives of state departments, re-
presentatives of the National AIDS Control Organization ðNACOÞ, and
public health experts. My theoretical sample of sex workers’ collectives
and HIV/AIDS-based NGOs included the two most nationally and in-
ternationally visible collectives, the Durbar Mahila Samanya Commit-
tee ðUnstoppable women’s collective; DMSCÞ and the Vyshya Ananyay
Mukthi Parishad ðForum to fight injustice on prostitutesÞ, and two of the
most prominent newly emerging regional collectives, Godhavari Mahila
Samakya ðGodhavari women’s collectiveÞ in Andhra Pradesh, Rajahmun-
dry, and Ashodaya ðin Karnataka, MysoreÞ. To diversify my sample, I also
included four NGOs and CBOs ðcommunity-based organizationsÞ that
were not part of the National Network for Sex Workers ðNNSWÞ in New
Delhi. I interviewed representatives of the Indian National Commission
for Women and the Women and Child Development Ministry ðWCDÞ,
which are the key public actors in the debates over legal changes concern-
ing prostitution.
The interviews were conducted in English, Hindi, and Telugu and
were transcribed and coded. My fluency in Hindi allowed me to communi-
cate with sex workers in most parts of northern India and West Bengal
ðmost of the sex worker representatives I spoke with in Kolkata could
speak HindiÞ. My fluency in Telugu enabled me to conduct interviews
in Rajahmundry, and I could also use Telugu to communicate with sex
workers from Mysore ðat the DMSC national meetingÞ because some of
these sex workers were bilingual.
To analyze state responses, I relied heavily on public documents, es-
pecially parliamentary committee reports, newspaper stories, and records
of public hearings. I drew on policy documents, pamphlets, materials pro-
duced by NNSW, NACO’s annual reports, and reports published by in-

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
208 y Lakkimsetti

ternational agencies such as UNAIDS and Human Rights Watch. My

coding focused on three themes: first, truth claims that are based on sci-
entific rationalities around safe sex and safe sex practices, scientific eval-
uation of project successes, and claims made based on subjective experiences;
second, technologies and strategies used for disease prevention, such as
identification, classification, targeting, and mobilization; and, finally, modes
of subject formation, such as specific ways in which sex workers interact
with health projects, peers, state agencies, and health and NGO actors,
and the ways they adjust their lives and sexual behavior for the purpose
of controlling the epidemic and the ways they formulate political demands.

The legal context of sex work in India

The legislative and legal framework for the regulation of prostitution in
India is contained in the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act ðITPAÞ of 1986.
The Indian statutory approach claims to balance the views that sex work
is immoral, that the sex trade is exploitative, and that sex workers need to
be rescued and rehabilitated. The law does not prohibit prostitution per
se but criminalizes a third party benefiting from prostitution ðsuch as pro-
curing women for brothelsÞ, punishes adults over eighteen for living off
the income of a prostitute, and punishes any person who solicits or se-
duces for the purpose of prostitution or engages in prostitution in public
places. The act has also established correctional institutions in which
women offenders are to be detained and reformed, and special police offi-
cers to enforce these provisions. Existing research on the ITPA indicates
that police rarely use the law against brothel keepers, traffickers, and cus-
tomers, and that sex workers are punished disproportionately under the
law ðD’Cunha 1992; Kotiswaran 2001Þ.
In addition to the ITPA, other criminal provisions in the Indian Penal
Code regulate underage trafficking, and prohibitions against the sale of
persons can be invoked to criminalize prostitution and trafficking; addi-
tional provisions in police laws and special local laws also make sex work-
ers subject to public nuisance and public obscenity laws. These general
laws may be used more frequently than the ITPA in some regions. Even
where the ITPA is not enforced, the criminal status of sex work funda-
mentally skews the bargaining potential of sex workers, who cannot en-
force contracts against brothel keepers, landlords, or customers. Despite
the limited use of the ITPA, its ambiguity, coupled with the constant threat
of its invocation, renders it extremely powerful ðKotiswaran 2011Þ. Be-
fore the 1990s, individual and collective efforts to challenge the law met
with little or no success. A critique of the law from the standpoint of
sex workers themselves did not emerge in the public sphere until the late

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 209

1990s. With the emergence of HIV/AIDS as a public health issue, sex

workers began to organize and make demands to repeal the law.4

The HIV epidemic and the initial response of the Indian state:
Denial and blame
Until the 1990s, silence characterized the public discourse around the
state regulation of prostitution in India. When HIV was first detected in
1986 among sex workers in the city of Chennai, the Indian state claimed
that HIV was a Western disease spread because of Western attitudes to-
ward sexuality. Because HIV was first discovered among sex workers,
women engaged in prostitution were vilified for importing the disease
by having sex with foreigners and were identified as a potential reservoir
of infection that threatened the general population. The first law passed
in India pertaining to AIDS, the 1989 AIDS Prevention Bill, provided
health authorities with invasive policing powers in the form of forcible
testing and the isolation of members of so-called high-risk groups, who
were defined predominantly as women prostitutes. The bill also required
registered medical practitioners to report the identity of any person they
knew to be HIV-positive to the government, and provided for coercive
tracking. In Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata, incidents of the forceful confine-
ment of sex workers in prisons and forceful testing were reported during
this period ðHuman Rights Watch 2002Þ.
Due to national and international pressure, the Indian state eventually
shifted its AIDS control policies toward prevention and control ðrather than
suppressionÞ of the epidemic. As a high-risk group, sex workers became one
of the most important targets of intervention. In 1992, India’s first National
AIDS Control Program ð1992–99Þ was launched, and NACO was created to
implement the program.5 NACO’s interventions operate on the premise
that in a low-prevalence country such as India, the HIV/AIDS epidemic can
be contained most efficiently by focusing prevention efforts on high-risk
groups. NACO established State AIDS Control Societies in every state.
The first phase of HIV/AIDS prevention ð1992–99Þ focused on informa-
tion dissemination and condom distribution; the second phase ð1999–
2006Þ focused on behavior change; the third phase ð2006–11Þ focused

4
Sex worker organizations not only demand the repeal of objectionable clauses in the
ITPA but also call for the repeal of the law itself, arguing that many exploitative practices can
be regulated using other clauses in the Indian Penal Code and that a separate prostitution law
only serves to regulate women’s sexuality and sexual labor.
5
NACO is a division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. NACO provides
policy guidelines for HIV/AIDS control programs in India through thirty-five HIV/AIDS
Prevention and Control Societies. See https://www.nacoonline.org/NACO.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
210 y Lakkimsetti

on targeted interventions in high-risk groups; the fourth and current

phase ð2012–17Þ, which is outside the scope of this article, focuses on im-
proving services and outreach to vulnerable groups. In the next section, I turn
to the empirical data to show how biopower projects shape sex workers’
political subjectivities.

Analysis
Imperatives of biopower: Sex workers and HIV prevention
Nandinee Bandhopadhya, a sex worker rights advocate and public health
expert associated with a sex worker project in the state of West Bengal,
reflected on the role of HIV in sex workers’ mobilization:
I remember we once used to do an exercise with sex workers in
West Bengal, Kolkata, and other parts as well; we would ask them
to map who their friends are, and who their enemies are. And most
sex workers would say, “HIV is our friend.” That was quite startling
to me, and they would say, without HIV you wouldn’t be here,
you wouldn’t even talk to us. So HIV is the first pretext, first excuse,
where sex workers could claim to be part of the development dis-
course. . . . They have been policed, and cleansed, and rescued and
rehabilitated, but they have never even been targeted for say, a wel-
fare program. ðEmphasis addedÞ

How can a disease that causes stigma, death, and discrimination be any-
one’s friend? Even while serving as a stark reminder of the social margin-
alization and invisibility of sex workers, the statement “HIV is our friend”
also points to effects of the state’s new focus on sex workers as a result of
the HIV epidemic. “Friends” in this articulation are NGOs, public health
experts, and health activists who otherwise would have been absent from
this space. It was not only that Indian sex workers needed friends to gain
visibility, but transnationally, NGOs, the state, and public health experts
soon realized that it would not be possible to work with sex workers with-
out actively involving and empowering them through these programs.
The friendship that HIV offered sex workers did not make them benefi-
ciaries of state actions, as the speaker indicated, but it did offer opportuni-
ties connected to the ways authorities related to them.
Representatives of DMSC, a sex workers’ collective working in one of
the largest red light districts in the city of Kolkata ðin West BengalÞ since
1992, told me that what started as a research study on the red light districts
later developed into a major HIV-prevention project as the researchers

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 211

began to include sex workers. Dr. Smarajit Jana, the public health expert
who headed the study, reflected on how this initial experience evolved
to shape the overall approach of many sex worker projects: “The first
problem we had to face in the beginning was that people in and around
the red light areas looked at us suspiciously. They didn’t like anyone who
is an outsider to be walking in and around the red light district, and they
did not want to talk with us. So we felt that until and unless we established
some sort of rapport in the sex workers’ community we will not be able
to carry on this research . . . it took around three months to just get the
most basic information.”
This lack of knowledge about the organization of the sex trade and
the lives of women in this sector posed problems of governance for pub-
lic health experts, which indicated the exclusion and invisibility of sex
workers in the civil society. Because access to sites and populations is
limited when it comes to reaching a highly stigmatized and criminalized
group, the leaders of this intervention project, like others, realized that
converting sex workers into agents of these transnational health pro-
grams would be essential to the programs’ success. As Dr. Jana went on
to say:
To run an intervention program there is a need to know much about
the community and their perspective, issues within the sex trade and
its relationship with the mainstream society. See, when WHO ½the
World Health Organization came, they had this view of three basic
elements in HIV intervention . . . you give education, you give con-
doms, and you provide STI services. Those are important things
technically speaking, but whether a person is able to access or uti-
lize the services is dependent on many factors. How ½do they pri-
oritize issues? To what extent are they able to enforce decisions? To
what extent will we be able to communicate with the community?

For Dr. Jana, a prerequisite for the effective implementation of the proj-
ects in communities that were closed to and suspicious of outsiders was
mutual accommodation, which he also called friendship: “We started rec-
ognizing that their ½sex workers’ priority issue is neither HIV ½nor health;
their priority issues that came up through interaction with them were police
violence and violence they face from local hooligans. We felt that we had
to address those so that they can feel that we are their true friends. Frankly
speaking, it was clear that HIV is our agenda, not their agenda, so it was very
clear, how to make our agenda theirs. And it cannot be done until and unless
we accept their agenda” ðemphasis addedÞ.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
212 y Lakkimsetti

In this process, public health programs that wanted to target sex

workers as a high-risk group were challenged to address issues of mar-
ginalization, violence, stigma, and criminalization. The Sonagachi proj-
ect—named after the largest red light district in Kolkata, where the pro-
gram started—headed by Dr. Jana not only included sex workers as peer
educators but also saw collective mobilization as a way to increase the
sex workers’ bargaining power with clients and brothel owners. Origi-
nating in these interventions, “respect, recognition, and rights” became
both a way to approach stigmatized and criminalized groups and a pop-
ular demand the groups raised in turn. A booklet published by the DMSC
spells out the connection in a way that is more politicized than Dr. Jana’s
explanation: “Because the practice of safer sex, we felt, cannot be dealt with
in isolation, we adopted the strategy of understanding the power structure,
and combining empowerment with the enhancement of negotiating skills
of the sex workers, for the sex workers, and by the sex workers” ðDMSC 2004,
28; emphasis addedÞ. The DMSC became an international role model for
effective HIV prevention. A 2000 UNAIDS report described the project’s
effect: “Gradually, what started as a narrowly conceived HIV prevention
project has become a social movement in West Bengal of no mean im-
portance, and is drawing sex workers and women’s rights organizations
from all over India and beyond. . . . The essential difference between the
process that has taken place in Sonagachi and elsewhere in the develop-
ing world is that the sex workers themselves, including their families and
friends, haven taken the lead to carry out the work of the intervention”
ðUNAIDS 2000, 58; emphasis addedÞ. Because of the state’s biopower
concerns, which were reflected in the state’s engagement in these com-
plex projects of surveillance and changing behavior, sex workers became
more integral to the state’s own success and thus became subjects of and
extensions of transnational governmentality programs.

Behavior change and surveillance: Deepening biopower projects

As public health programs have moved from denial, to simple condom dis-
tribution and information dissemination, to behavior change, behavior sur-
veillance, and behavior monitoring, the role of sex workers in these pro-
grams has also shifted from targets to implementers. In the third phase of
the national HIV/AIDS program, the Indian state has officially acknowl-
edged that it needs to work with communities and create an environment
for empowerment to successfully prevent the spread of HIV. For exam-
ple, the state cites the collectivization of sex workers in Sonagachi as stall-
ing the epidemic by ensuring that 86 percent of sex workers used con-

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 213

doms, and presents this example as a best practice to be followed by other

HIV-prevention projects. Moreover, transnational funding agencies—such
as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—also enabled the shift toward
these collective mobilization strategies.
From the second to the third phase, Indian HIV/AIDS programs
shifted from a prevention approach to a targeted intervention approach
that focuses on behavioral strategies that cannot be implemented without
the active involvement of sex workers. Currently, the state sees its programs
as forming communities that are asked to internalize the responsibility for
the prevention and management of the disease. NGOs are not just provid-
ing services to sex workers but are also training them to administer and
monitor health services. State projects transform the objects of HIV/
AIDS programs into active extensions of transnational health projects
who become agents of governmentality and of the state. NACO’s goal
in this phase was to directly fund community-based organizations—which
are led and run by sex workers themselves—to manage and implement
its HIV programs. Although there is still variation in how actual HIV inter-
ventions with sex workers occur across India, the rationales, technologies
of disease prevention, systems of surveillance, best practices, and evidence-
based knowledge created by sex workers are increasingly tested, shared, and
collectively validated by transnational governmental agents.
These epidemiologically driven international health developments em-
phasize both community monitoring and the generation of bodies of
knowledge about patterns of sexual behavior, behavior change, condom
use, sexually transmitted infections ðSTIsÞ, and HIV status. Sex workers
are identifying other sex workers, mapping sites where sex work happens,
working out peer strategies to reach out to other sex workers, creating
strategies for the regular monitoring of condom use, and ensuring regular
checkups at STI clinics. This work requires the in-depth and detailed man-
agement of bodies, which can only happen with the willing involvement of
sex workers themselves.
Constructing this relation of friendship between sex workers and state
biopower projects better facilitates sexual health, brings new technolo-
gies and regimes of disciplinary power to sexuality, transforms stigma
into risk, and defines risk management as a shared value of the state and
sex workers. Therefore, these strategies and tactics not only disperse state
power but also make individual sex workers responsible for regulating
and monitoring sexual risk and behavior. This programmatic rationality
is clearly reflected in NACO’s program guidelines for high-risk groups.
In an illustration of the importance given to sex workers as educators,

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
214 y Lakkimsetti

peer educators form the core of NACO programs.6 They are valued not
only for their acceptability and credibility in the peer community but also
as the state’s best means for generating accurate information, usable data,
and programmatic evidence. This role is not contingent on their existing
level of health awareness but on the access they have to local communities;
reaching out to these communities is understood as the most difficult and
risky aspect of HIV/AIDS work. Because the inclusion of true peers is re-
garded as the gold standard of effectiveness, it is in the pragmatic interest
of the state to include sex workers. As the state moves from a pedagogic
role ðsimple distribution of condoms and health informationÞ to a gov-
ernance mode ðchanging intimate behaviorÞ, the role of sex workers be-
comes even more central. For the planners and implementers of programs,
sex workers’ input into strategies of individual behavioral surveillance is
framed as political and moral: “Community-led initiatives allow members
of the community to enable HRGs ½high-risk groups to play the role of
a pressure group as consumers to maintain and reinforce the quality of
services, leading to sustained demand for high-quality services” ðNACO
2007, 16Þ. The terms community, pressure group, and consumers are no-
table in this excerpt because they indicate how epidemiologically driven
transnational health programs articulate these new forms of governance.
The introduced mechanisms of discipline and regulation are not directly
repressive, but they facilitate new modes of accountability and enume-
ration through the technologies of data collection and legitimate risk re-
duction as a biopower project. Drawing sex workers into these programs
as pressure groups and consumers bridges the moral distinction between
the state and its agents.
The promoters of these HIV governmentality projects thus mobilize
sex workers as agents of governance by reimagining them as a community
with the right not only to be served but also to be heard. The mobiliza-
tion of this community to participate in providing and using health ser-
vices actually produces the referenced community. Once sex workers are
imagined as communities, space is opened for discourses in which sex
becomes socially relevant and acceptable. In the routine, mundane, and
seemingly banal practices of targeting marginalized groups, these bio-
power projects produce discourses and subjects capable of greater politi-
cal agency. I turn now to show how sex workers not only become agents
of these programs but also take the initiative in molding, meeting, and
resisting the state at these discursive sites.

6
The graphic and visual representation of the high-risk groups at the core can be accessed
through the NACO’s website ðsee NACO 2007, 27Þ.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 215

The imperatives of biopolitics: Sex workers’ claims to subjectivity

During an interview with members of a sex worker collective from
south India, the sex workers described how their relationship with the
police and other state agencies had shifted since they started forming
collectives. As Kumari explained: “Previously, when we used to go to the
police station we used to be very scared, and would stand meekly in a
corner and cover our faces because of shame. Now it is not like that, we
go with our head high, and they ask us to take a seat, if we go to the
collector’s office they are asking us to sit, MLA is asking us to sit, a cor-
porator is asking us to sit.”7 A collector, an MLA ðMember of Legisla-
tive AssemblyÞ, and a corporator refer to the county-level bureaucrats
and political representatives that sex worker collectives approach when
they find local police unresponsive to incidents of violence against fellow
sex workers, face arbitrary arrests, or want to access state welfare programs.
Kumari’s comment does not indicate that police violence against indi-
vidual sex workers has ended, or that harassment and threats from others
have gone away. Instead, the quote indicates a political consciousness
of sex workers as community organizers that enables them to access the
state and civil societal spaces as organizers of and valued participants in
programs. While this access may be limited to the sites in which sex work-
ers are collectively mobilized, I found evidence of a more general shift
in sex workers’ relationships with the police. Sex workers in south Delhi,
who are not explicitly mobilized in political ways, indicated to me that
they have stopped paying bribes to the police due to the strength of their
interactions with the NGOs active in HIV/AIDS work. In addition, as
members of HIV/AIDS prevention programs and women’s collectives,
sex workers share platforms with state bureaucrats and political leaders
while launching or expanding projects and are invited to other public events
to generate awareness about HIV.
When asked why she thought this inclusion was occurring, Pedamma,
another active member of the collective, said, “Why, because of the pro-
grams we are undertaking. We are doing good work in the society, we are
telling people who are not aware of safe sex about safe sex. So they also see
that we are doing good for the society, that even if they are prostitutes they
are useful to other people in the society” ðemphasis addedÞ. The affirmation
that these sex workers were “doing good for the society” was couched
in both the new language of health and the old language of stigma ð“even
if they are prostitutes”Þ. In this articulation, juridical and disciplinary power
are in tension. This tension is also expressed in sex workers’ simultaneous

7
All names are pseudonyms except for the names of public figures.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
216 y Lakkimsetti

demands to be recognized as a community and assertions of social value

through the HIV prevention work they undertake. As another sex worker
noted, “If doctors go to the sex worker and say, ‘You are a sex worker. Do
you have a condom?’ will they listen to them? No, they will not listen to
them; sex workers will only listen to sex workers. Because we are achiev-
ing something that no doctor is able to achieve, it can be preventing HIV
or STDs, or anything else; we are facing it and fighting it. And hence they
are recognizing us; they think that as a collective we are doing good to
the society” ðemphasis addedÞ. This quotation indicates the women’s self-
awareness of their central role in fighting HIV: “we are achieving some-
thing no doctor is able to achieve.” The sex worker deploys the same lan-
guage that the programs use to recruit sex workers and seek their active
participation.
While it might seem simple for a sex worker to approach another
sex worker, in reality the work is challenging and the community of sex
workers is fragile. In claiming their identity as community mobilizers and
community health educators, sex workers accept the risks of arrest and
humiliation, without accepting the sense of themselves as victims. Peer
educators and outreach workers are also put in the position of having to
mediate between the needs of the sex workers and the medically driven
prevention projects. Despite these difficulties, the sex workers affirm them-
selves as important and claim recognition as gatekeepers of the epidemic
for themselves, other sex workers, their clients, and society at large. There-
fore, on the one hand, this project-driven language mobilizes sex work-
ers and makes them part of these programs, while on the other hand, the
sex workers use the language of biopower to actively claim recognition of
their work and subjectivity.
Although sex workers’ actual ownership of these programs is debat-
able and their social marginalization has hardly been eradicated, these
quotes reveal a politicized consciousness of actors who play an important
part in promoting the social good. Moreover, these assertions also indi-
cate plurality in the political meanings of such categories. Paradoxically,
state surveillance and regulation, the proliferation of statistics on sex
and “high-risk” behaviors, and the state’s preoccupation with questions
of sexual behavior and sexual health have offered sex workers discursive
spaces in which to form collectives and assert themselves politically while
the state continues to juridically criminalize sex workers. Because the ITPA
remains a major impediment to sex workers enjoying their rights as citi-
zens, they reframe the law as an obstacle to HIV prevention.
To the extent that the criminalization of sex work makes the negotia-
tion of safe sex difficult and puts peer educators at risk of harassment and

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 217

arrest, the state’s own policies are contradictory. For example, violence
against sex workers includes arbitrary arrests, beatings, extortion, sexual
coercion, and the forced rescue and rehabilitation of women in brothels.
Sex workers’ collectives assert that police violence is one of the biggest
problems they face, and their HIV programs connect legal constraints on
sex workers, violence, and HIV/AIDS prevention. Still, since 1997, sex
worker organizations such as DMSC have been demanding the decrim-
inalization of prostitution and ineffectually claiming workers’ rights for
themselves. The biopolitical subjectivity of sex workers’ claims to social
value supports and is supported by the emerging transnational projects
of health and human rights, but it challenges and is challenged by the con-
tinued state investment in repression, practices of exclusion, and tolerance
for harassment and violence. This contradiction emerges sharply in the de-
bate over amending the ITPA.

Contentious biopolitics: Resistance to state regulation

In 2005, the Indian government proposed amendments to the ITPA
that would decriminalize soliciting but criminalize clients’ visits to broth-
els. In my interview with Renuka Chowdhury ðthe WCD minister who
introduced the amendmentÞ in 2009, I asked her what had motivated
her to propose the amendments, and she argued that, “You have to tar-
get the demand side, if you only target the supply side nothing is going
to happen. Because the supply side is going on for centuries and as long
as there is demand there is going to be supply.” Chowdhury’s remarks
reflect a growing transnational discourse of sex workers as victims of ex-
ploitation, and moves to criminalize clients and decriminalize soliciting.
The decriminalization of soliciting could be a significant political gain
for sex workers, but they have resisted this interpretation. They have ar-
gued that the proposal to criminalize clients attacks their means of live-
lihood, which is a bigger loss to them. Sex workers also resist the move
to broaden the definition of force or coercion to include economic com-
pulsion, as this would mean that all sex work would be seen as sexual
exploitation and violence against women ðregardless of whether traffick-
ing or any other exploitative conditions were involvedÞ; they have argued
for sex work to be seen as an economic activity.
The WCD’s proposal to criminalize the actions of clients came as a
surprise to sex worker groups, human rights groups, and even NACO,
which considered the proposal an affront to its HIV prevention programs.
Alerted by friendly lawyers and NGO advocates, sex workers’ collectives
rejected these amendments and organized a march to the Indian Par-
liament in New Delhi in March 2006. In every advocacy document, sex

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
218 y Lakkimsetti

workers highlighted how the law had been introduced without consult-
ing them. They demanded that any change in laws pertaining to sex
work should only be considered after consultation with sex workers and
their organizations—a remarkable claim to citizenship.
Yielding to these protests, in June 2006 the Indian government ap-
pointed a parliamentary committee to study public opinion about the
issue. The committee organized a hearing, accepted public opinion on the
issue, and invited the representatives of the WCD and NACO to present
their positions. Sex worker collectives from around the country sent me-
moranda, and some publicly appeared before the committee and the na-
tional media to present their arguments. In its memorandum to the com-
mittee, one sex worker collective argued:
The entire attempt in the process of amending the ITPA seems to
us to be a backdoor method of abolishing prostitution. We wish you
to understand that sex workers have become more visible, more
aware of HIV and its prevention modes and have taken the respon-
sibility to arrest the transmission rates of the virus. If such amend-
ments are allowed to be passed as a law, it will only help push the
entire industry underground, bringing untold miseries to women
who have become empowered and have started owning up to their re-
sponsibilities through a process of breaking all structural barriers. The
proposed amendments will reverse the entire process and make us in-
visible once again. ðEmphasis addedÞ8

The articulation of sex work as a means of livelihood, and sex workers as

an important group responsible for HIV prevention, emerged very clearly
in the protests. To counter the move to make these laws more stringent,
the collectives frequently pointed to successful sex worker programs in
certain parts of India and to how sex workers as a community have changed
sexual behavior. A sex workers’ collective explained:

When the customer is persecuted, neither the market demand for

sexual services vanishes, nor does the security of the sex worker in-
crease. The entire sex sector, however, is forced to go underground.
This is not only going to be very dangerous for the sex workers,
who will be delivered to the wolves of the underworld on a platter,
it will also have catastrophic consequences for the sexual health of

8
Letter to the Parliamentary Committee by Ashodaya Sex Workers Collective, Manga-
lore, 2006.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 219

our people. The service-providing workers and customers of our vast sex
sector will no more visit our STD/HIV clinics. Nobody will be able to
ensure safe sex practices or monitor incidence of STDs or of HIV/AIDS
in the sex sector. ðEmphasis addedÞ9

The quotation includes a combined emphasis on economics, violence,

and the need for disease monitoring and regulation. This sex worker’s
collective employed discourses of death, described as “catastrophic con-
sequences” for the nation’s health, as their own claim to biopower to
counter the more typical moral panic around trafficking and prostitution.
This practice is commonplace. Facts and statistics about STIs and HIV
prevalence and prevention rates have been presented at all the forums
in which sex workers and their advocates have raised the issue, revealing
how the imperatives of biopolitics serve as the basis for resisting juridical
and repressive power.
The connection between governmentality and rights emerges strik-
ingly in campaign materials generated by the NNSW, which were used
to lobby legislators to stop the proposed amendment:

As a legislator, before you “vote” on our lives and livelihoods, we

would like to draw your attention to the experiences of sex workers,
a community that continues to bear the burden of social and legal
repression in India. We would also like to take you through some
of the path-breaking work that sex workers’ collectives have done
in the larger public interest. These include inter alia, the prevention
and control of STDs and HIV/AIDS, countering trafficking of mi-
nors in sex work, setting up cooperatives for economic empower-
ment, and imparting education and training to children from mar-
ginalized sections.10

The contribution of sex workers to the collective good ðe.g., preserving

life, inculcating good sexual practices, and protecting minors from traf-
fickingÞ is constantly emphasized as these collectives demand that sex
work be recognized as legitimate work. In doing so, sex workers are not
merely voicing the sexual health discourses and needs presented to them

9
DMSC, “Why the Sex Workers of India Marched to Parliament Demanding Repeal of
the ITðPÞA.” Self-published pamphlet, on file with author.
10
This quotation is taken from “Advocating for Change,” a pamphlet compiled by the
National Network of Sex Workers in 2005. The document is not available for public circu-
lation but is on file with the author.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
220 y Lakkimsetti

by the state and international HIV projects. Rather, sex workers and
their supporters in India have crucially transformed the discourse by de-
manding rights and recognition for themselves and their work, and by re-
defining themselves as more than merely vectors of disease transmission
to be managed. Far from being co-opted, in advocating for their own rights,
sex workers adopt the claims of the state and redeploy them as counter-
claims against state regulations.
It was in this contentious environment that the parliamentary com-
mittee submitted its report to the Indian Parliament in 2006. The com-
mittee held that the criminalization of clients was weak and unenforceable
and would increase harassment and obstruct safety and HIV prevention.
While accepting some of the demands made by sex workers, the committee
agreed with the core assumption on which the WCD’s amendments were
based ði.e., that sex work is exploitative regardless of the conditionsÞ and
recommended that the state develop more coordinated strategies for ef-
fectively addressing both trafficking and HIV/AIDS. Even with these res-
ervations expressed by the parliamentary committee, it was rumored that
the WCD would present the bill in its original form in Parliament, which
led sex worker organizations to mobilize donor agencies, NGOs, and hu-
man rights groups in a coalition against the bill.
The position of this alliance was presented in a joint statement re-
leased at a national consultation on HIV and law initiated by the Lawyers
Collective and the National Network for Sex Workers, a human rights
group, with funding from NACO. The national consultation was orga-
nized to bring together HIV/AIDS donors, NGOs, and advocacy groups
that supported sex workers’ rights to broaden and strengthen the critical
voice against the proposed amendments. The joint statement reads: “The
recent attempts at sex work law reform have been informed by concerns
arising out of trafficking alone and are unmindful of public health con-
siderations. While the existing legislative framework has done little to in-
hibit trafficking, community-led, targeted interventions are proving effective
in containing and even reducing STIs and HIV. That this has happened
despite an unfavorable legal environment is due largely to strategies that are
pragmatic, non-judgmental and respect the rights of sex workers. On the
contrary, anti-trafficking measures have been knee-jerk, moralistic and an-
tithetical to rights, and shown ineffective over a long term.”11 Here the

11
This quotation is taken from a document circulated during the consultation ðon file with
the authorÞ. A summary of the proceedings can be found at http://www.lawyerscollective.org
/files/summary%20proceedings%20of %20national%20Consultation.pdf.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 221

pragmatic, nonjudgmental attitude is justified as coming from “objective”

and scientific approaches to epidemiology, and presented as better than
antitrafficking measures, which are “knee-jerk, moralistic and antithetical
to rights.” The statement contrasts the two modes of state regulation—
pragmatic biopower versus repressive juridical power—and comes out
strongly in favor of the former. By noting the “unfavorable legislative en-
vironment,” the joint statement accepts and validates sex workers’ critiques
of the law. In fact, many HIV/AIDS organizations and donors who had
never before taken a stand on prostitution now endorsed the position of
the sex workers on this amendment. The fear that this legislation would
impede HIV/AIDS prevention convinced these NGOs for the first time to
take a public stand reflecting the sex workers’ perspective.
These developments also created a rift within the state: the Ministry
of Health, an important part of these transnational HIV projects, and the
WCD took very different positions with regard to the amendments. The
Ministry of Health and NACO supported the sex workers’ position, which
emphasized the impediments posed to their HIV prevention work, and
the WCD viewed the bill as a way of protecting women by criminalizing
clients, assuming that no woman would freely consent to sell sex. The
Indian government formed a committee to resolve this disagreement be-
tween the two departments. In her 2009 interview with me, Chowdhury
not only expressed dissatisfaction with certain ministries and internal poli-
tics within the ruling party at that time but also described the sex workers’
protest as merely an instigation by NACO and international donor agen-
cies. Chowdhury asserted, “My biggest opponent was NACO, they have
so much money and no accountability. They argued that all sex will be driven
underground and that the amendment would affect HIV prevention.”
Chowdhury’s opinion did not reflect any direct engagement with the sex
workers’ groups.
The state’s internal disagreement, the large and visible political pro-
tests of the sex workers, and the 2009 parliamentary elections delayed
the presentation of the bill, which subsequently lapsed. If the debate re-
emerges, the bill must go through the entire parliamentary process again,
and sex workers and their supporters are unsure whether the new WCD
minister will be politically committed enough to reintroduce such a con-
troversial measure.
What, if any, concrete legal solutions will emerge from this contesta-
tion is a matter of speculation, but the fact that one major arm of the state
feels compelled to work with sex workers on HIV/AIDS prevention has
created a visible institutional fissure within the state. Concern about traf-

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
222 y Lakkimsetti

ficking and HIV/AIDS prevention produced two competing global de-

mands regarding sex work. In addition to this internal friction, sex work-
ers managed to create a public debate about the bill and were able to
use their credibility with HIV/AIDS programs to establish themselves
as a political community that must be represented in the state decision-
making process. In the space produced by the tension between juridical
public order and biopolitical governmentality, sex workers have consti-
tuted themselves as a political group capable of making claims on the
Indian state.

Conclusion
As this case illustrates, the biopower needs of the modern state produce
ongoing projects rife with contestations about the inclusion and exclu-
sion of stigmatized actors as subjects and citizens. These contestations are
not confined within the state but extend through governmentality into
both transnational and local mobilizations. Sex workers in particular are
recruited to biopower projects due to their “risk” status, but in seizing
the hand of friendship extended in HIV/AIDS projects, sex workers have
become empowered to claim rights and exercise definitional authority in
unexpected ways. Their new claim to social membership enables them to
mobilize both to protect their economic livelihoods and to defend their
honor as contributors to the social good. The use of biopower and gov-
ernmentality as analytical tools reveals the close connection between reg-
ulation and resistance. Thus, precisely at the moment of heightened sur-
veillance, sex workers also became the subjects of state and transnational
projects that opened possibilities for resistance. This analysis shows how
Indian sex workers became able to use the imperatives of biopower to
make politically effective and discursively legitimated moral and political
claims around life and biological citizenship.
State regulations in a transnational context are shaped not only by lo-
cally grounded mobilizations of sex workers but also by transnational vi-
sions and understandings of sexual health and sexual rationality. More-
over, transnational pulls on the Indian state to be fierce on trafficking
ðmostly from certain feminist groupsÞ as well as to respond more effectively
to HIV ðfrom public health groupsÞ also fragment the state’s interest in sex
work. Hence, given the fragmentation of a postcolonial state confronted
with such external power ðand big donor agenciesÞ, it is not surprising that
the Indian state is not a hegemonic force when it comes to the regulation
of women in prostitution.
The phenomenon of Indian sex workers protesting changes in the le-
gal regulation of prostitution offers a lens through which to examine the

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 223

relationship between abject groups and civil society because sex workers’
status in the gender and sexual hierarchy places them in the periphery,
and their criminalization marginalizes them from political society. These
sex workers’ protests thus highlight the transformative effects of biopower
for multiply marginalized actors. The reconfiguration of power initiated
by responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis enabled sex workers to become visi-
ble in political society, forcing both the civil society and the state to address
their issues seriously. This inversion of power provided sex workers with
new spaces and possibilities for different forms of resistance ðvisible pro-
tests, lobbying, networkingÞ and new moral discourses around health,
life, and longevity as a basis for political negotiations with both state and
civil societal agencies. The networks sex workers forged with medical ex-
perts, transnational agencies, and state institutions such as NACO during
the ITPA controversy best illustrate these shifts.
Scholars have argued that claims for citizenship based on health are
emerging as salient forces in many developing countries where widespread
poverty and a “hollowed-out state” cannot offer any guarantees against
the uncertainties of life ðNguyen 2004, 143Þ. A further examination of
how this may operate for the self-organization of multiply marginalized
women would be worthwhile, especially because feminist and other social
movements in India have not taken the initiative to engage with sex work-
ers and confront their political and social marginality.
The sex workers’ protest adds an additional layer to the theorizing of
political society because it raises questions about stigma, criminalization,
and abjection in order to better understand the democratic and political
negotiations of the subjects who are at the margins of the margins. Bio-
political governmentality was an entry point for sex workers to become
more visible members of political society—an important first step because
their existence primarily as illegal subjects has meant extreme vulnerability
vis-à-vis state and civil society institutions. Even with the reduced salience
of HIV/AIDS in the future, this seems to be a transformation that may
continue to enhance sex workers’ broader struggles around rights and rec-
ognition. The Indian state has recently recognized sex workers’ organiza-
tions as civil societal organizations, and these groups are now being reg-
istered as NGOs and CBOs, indicating that they and their members are
becoming part of civil society. In sites such as DMSC, sex workers are cre-
atively using their organizational membership to gain access to banking,
education, and other sectors of civil life that had previously been closed to
them. Further research on the interactions between political and civil so-
ciety may suggest when and how biopower projects have had an impact on
sex workers. Careful examination of the modes of mobilization, organi-

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
224 y Lakkimsetti

zational strategies, and social fields in which these organizations operate

will further reveal these connections.

Department of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies Program

Texas A&M University

References
Bernstein, Elizabeth, and Laurie Schaffner, eds. 2005. Regulating Sex: The Poli-
tics of Intimacy and Identity. New York: Routledge.
Burton, Antoinette M. 1992. “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists
and ‘the Indian Woman,’ 1865–1915.” In Western Women and Imperialism: Com-
plicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, 137–57.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1996. “Sexual Inversions.” In Feminist Interpretations of Michel
Foucault, ed. Susan J. Hekman, 59–77. University Park: Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 2006. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Pol-
itics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press.
D’Cunha, Jean. 1992. “Prostitution Laws: Ideological Dimensions and Enforce-
ment Practices.” Economic and Political Weekly 27ð17Þ:WS34 – 44.
DMSC ðDurbar Mahila Samanwaya CommitteeÞ. 2004. “The ‘Fallen’ Learn To
Rise.” Report, DMSC, Kolkata.
Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2005. “Spatializing States: Toward an Eth-
nography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” In Anthropologies of Modernity:
Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda, 105–35.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans.
Robert Hurley. London: Allen Lane.
———. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern-
mentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1996. “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” In Feminist
Interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. Susan J. Hekman, 59 –77. University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Ghosh, Swati. 2005. “Surveillance in Decolonized Social Space: The Case of Sex
Workers in Bengal.” Social Text 83 23ð2Þ:55– 69.
Gupta, Geeta Rao, Justin O. Parkhurst, Jessica A. Ogden, Peter Aggleton,
and Ajay Mahal. 2008. “Structural Approaches to HIV Prevention.” Lancet
372ð9640Þ:764 –75.
Hekman, Susan J. 1996. “Introduction.” In Feminist Interpretations of Michel
Foucault, 1–12. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 S I G N S Autumn 2014 y 225

Human Rights Watch. 2002. “Epidemic of Abuse: Police Harassment of HIV/

AIDS Outreach Workers in India.” Report, Human Rights Watch, http://
www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india2/india0602.pdf.
Jamı̄la, Nalini, and J. Devika. 2007. Autobiography of a Sex Worker. Chennai:
Westland.
Kapur, Ratna 2005. Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism.
London: GlassHouse.
Kempadoo, Kamala. 2005a. “COIN and MODEMU in the Dominican Republic.”
In Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempa-
doo and Jo Doezema, 260–66. New York: Routledge.
———. 2005b. “Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights.” In Global Sex
Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo
Doezema, 1–28. New York: Routledge.
Kim-Puri, H. J. 2005. “Conceptualizing Gender-Sexuality-State-Nation: An In-
troduction.” Gender and Society 19ð2Þ:137– 59.
Kotiswaran, Prabha. 2001. “Preparing for Civil Disobedience: Indian Sex Work-
ers and the Law.” Boston College Third World Law Journal 21ð2Þ:161–242.
———. 2011. Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Law, Lisa. 2001. Sex Work in Southeast Asia: The Place of Desire in a Time of
AIDS. New York: Routledge.
Levine, Philipa. 2000. “Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sex-
ualities.” Feminist Review, no. 65: 5 –21.
Longo, Paulo Henrique. 2005. “The Pegacao Program: Information, Prevention
and Empowerment of Young Male Sex Workers in Rio de Janiero.” In Global
Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and
Jo Doezema, 231–39. New York: Routledge
Misra, Geetanjali, Ajay Mahal, and Rima Shah. 2000. “Protecting the Rights of
Sex Workers: The Indian Experience.” Health and Human Rights 5ð1Þ:88–
115.
NACO ðNational AIDS Control OrganizationÞ. 2007. “Targeted Interventions
under NACP III: Operational Guidelines; Volume I, Core High Risk Groups.”
Report, NACO, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.
https://naco.gov.in/upload/Publication/NGOs%20and%20targetted%20
Intervations/NACP-III.pdf.
Nguyen, Vinh-kim. 2004. “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic
Citizenship.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthro-
pological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 124–44. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tambe, Ashwini. 2009. Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Co-
lonial Bombay. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
226 y Lakkimsetti

Tandia, Oumar. 2005. “Prostitution in Senegal.” In Global Sex Workers: Rights,

Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, 240 –45.
New York: Routledge.
UNAIDS. 2000. Female Sex Worker HIV Prevention Projects: Lessons Learnt from
Papua New Guinea, India and Bangladesh. Geneva: UNAIDS.
Walkowitz, Judith. 1980. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the
State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This content downloaded from

137.111.162.20 on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:18:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms