Beyond Prostitution: Sexual Commerce as Precarity and Possibility in Mumbai, India

Within activist circles, global feminist discourse, and academic conversations surrounding gender and agency, sex work has often been framed as an exceptional space of disempowerment, trafficking, and exploitation. Svati P. Shah’s beautifully engaged ethnography, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai, challenges this narrative by attending to the material landscape of rural labor migration to Mumbai. In doing so, the text provides a lens through which to ask questions about labor migration, material survival, and the criminalization of marginalized subjects.

This exploration of the space surrounding what Shah labels “sexual commerce” (not only full-time sex work and solicitation but also sex work as supplemental to other forms of unregulated and informalized labor practices) provides a necessary intervention to the “talk of crime,” in which violence and exploitation are unavoidable outcomes of these forms of intimate and corporeal labor practices. Instead, Shah layers the multiple effects of migration to hyperurban centers, showing how unregulated labor practices for migrants intersect with their access to resources (water, housing, municipal services) and community support.

The book contains an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter, “Day Wage Labor and Migration: Making Ends Meet,” provides a theoretical frame by placing sexual commerce alongside other forms of everyday survival and negotiations for recent rural labor migrants entering and engaging an intensely urban location. The next three chapters move to three spaces of negotiation—public day-wage labor markets known as nakas, the street, and the red-light districts. Chapter 2, “Sex, Work, and Silence from the Construction Workers’ Naka,” considers the micro-visibility and inherent surveillance of women soliciting day labor in the nakas. The third chapter, “Sex Work and the Street,” engages the regulation and criminalization of sexual commerce on the hypervisible public street, where who uses public space and how is a daily negotiation. Lastly, “Red-Light Districts, Rescue, and Real Estate” explores two of Mumbai’s main red-light districts and considers how prostitution mythology has been constructed through the language of victimhood, disempowerment, and global HIV/AIDS discourse. Romantic and spectacular savior narratives have overlooked the realities of neighborhood transformation, housing-based displacement, and “world-class” city formation. Through these three sites, the book “interrogates the ways in which sexual commerce and day wage labor are produced as mutually exclusive, and even incommensurate, categories of analysis in scholarship on prostitution, and in scholarship on informal economies” (3). Instead, Shah resituates sexual commerce as one strategy within a landscape of unregulated labor practices and, in doing so, demands that scholarship on the “informal economy” attend to questions of gender, race, class, and caste.

Perhaps most critically, the book considers how one “knows” about sex work and practices of solicitation, particularly in contexts where “how one ‘knows’ . . . is both universally acknowledged and unsaid” (5). These “open secrets” (being what sex workers “really” do) involve “as much speaking as . . . silence, as much deflection as . . . articulation” (194). In doing so, Shah disrupts notions of “knowability” and, in turn, challenges the frame of “risk,” at least in terms of what previous scholars and activists claim to “know” about the riskiness of sex work. This is not just a question of “that which cannot be spoken of” but also an acknowledgment of the oversaturation of sex-worker-as-subject research. Such an interest in sex worker subjectivities—from public health workers, journalists, academics, documentarians, and so forth—has trapped migrant women engaging in varying forms of sexual commerce within the reified frame of “the prostitute.” Interrogating knowability speaks to the challenge of ethnography as an always emerging form of methodology, in which “what we know” is contingent on time and space, as well as mutually constructed notions of safety, appropriateness, and accessibility. In considering rumor, secrecy, and that-which-must-remain-unsaid (3), ethno-graphic knowability emerges as much from silence and absence as conversation and observation.

In concluding, Shah discusses the use of marzi (meaning “choice”) and...