Abstract: Feminist theorists have challenged the treatment of sex work as an exceptional practice, even as, for many women, sexual exchange for livelihood, survival, and social mobility is a mundane part of economic and social life, whether in marriage or outside of it (e.g. Pheterson 1993; Mitra 2020; Kotiswaran 2007). Yet research on sex work typically considers them as distinct from other types of workers. In this talk, I present very preliminary results from fieldwork on precarious women workers in and around Bangalore between January and July 2024. Drawing on 92 interviews with cisgender women garment workers, sex workers, and street vendors, and transgender women who do sex work and begging, most of whom are rural-urban migrants, I highlight the links and overlaps between these areas of work, as well as the differences and points of tension. I focus on the ways gendered relationships within the family shape their migration trajectories, and how gendered demands of care, including motherhood and elder care, lead to often multiple livelihood strategies at once.
About the speaker: Gowri Vijayakumar is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, USA. Her research and teaching use a feminist lens to study social movements, the state, global institutions, and political economy. Her award-winning book, At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021), examined the effects of HIV funding and prevention programs on the social movement articulations of sex worker, sexual minority, and transgender groups in India, with an ethnographic focus on Bangalore. She serves on the editorial boards of Signs and Gender & Society. She is also the co-editor of Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). Gowri works closely with community-based organizations through her research. She has also worked with Aneka, Solidarity Foundation, and the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union, on projects on sex workers’ labor activism and aging experiences, as well as with Sadhana Mahila Sangha to examine ways to bring the experiences of sex workers to broader audiences.