Abstract
In this chapter, I explore relations of intimacy and belonging within the lives of women in sex work, living in a red-light area in Eastern India. Specifically, I unpack two such relations: sexual-affective relations with long-term customers and motherhood with children born within and outside sex work. I examine how these relations are (per)formed, perceived, managed and experienced, and how they affect each other. I highlight how this process reproduces the red-light area as a space where social and emotional arrangements co-exist with the economic. Conceptually, I draw on Illouz’s (Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity, Cambridge, 2007, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Polity, Cambridge, 2012) work on ‘cold intimacies’ and the ‘architecture of choice’ to explore how agency and victimhood co-exist dynamically in the lives of women in sex work for whom the ‘domestic’ and the ‘workplace’ overlap.
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- 1.
The research received ethical approval from the International Development Ethics Committee, School of International Development, University of East Anglia.
- 2.
All names have been changed to protect confidentiality.
- 3.
Emphasis added.
- 4.
Women who live outside the red-light area, for example, in towns or villages close to the city of Kolkata. They travel to the red-light area and rent spaces for the day, and return to their residences in the evenings.
- 5.
I am aware of the problematic connotations of the term in its usage.
- 6.
All ages are self-reported.
- 7.
A ‘sex workers’ NGO in the red-light area runs a financial cooperative bank.
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Guha, M. (2020). ‘I Entered This Life Because My Husband Left Me, I Have to Be Careful Now’: A Study of Domesticity, Intimacy and Belonging in the Lives of Women in Sex Work in a Red-Light Area in Eastern India. In: Carter, J., Arocha, L. (eds) Romantic Relationships in a Time of ‘Cold Intimacies’. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29256-0_10
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