#MeToo from the Margins: Rethinking Consent-Coercion Binaries with Commercial Sex Work in India

During the 2017 resurgence of the MeToo movement, you may not have heard much from sex workers. Were we there? Did you somehow miss us?

—Selena the Stripper (West and Horn 2021)

A critical intervention in the #MeToo movement has been brought forth by sex workers, who point out that #MeToo doesn't adequately complicate binary-coding of consent/coercion and sex/work that underlies this movement, the feminist movement broadly, and the legal infrastructure which regulates sexual commerce (Cooney 2018, West and Horn 2021). An article published by Time magazine in early 2018 highlighted how several sex workers, who came out on Twitter to recount their #MeToo stories, faced severe stigma-driven backlash and subsequently felt that they had "been excluded from the public conversation around #MeToo" and the "nationwide reckoning on workplace harassment" (Cooney 2018). Selena's questions then, about whether sex workers were "there" in #MeToo discourses, pave the way for a critical feminist inquiry into a seemingly paradoxical situation, whereby sex workers find themselves most vulnerable to sexual assault and gender-based violence as well as quite overlooked and excluded from media, policy and academic narratives on #MeToo. In this paper, I discuss sex workers' critiques of #MeToo by highlighting how the movement does little to disrupt the binary coding of consent and coercion. This is further reflected in and complicated through similar dualistic notions about sex and work, underlying legal systems, and moral norms which govern sexual commerce and which continue to hinder sex workers' demands for rights and justice. I ground these critiques in a study of sex work activism in India to identify thematic continuities between sex workers' critiques of #MeToo and similar concerns raised by Indian sex work activists.

To formulate sex workers' critiques of the #MeToo movement, my paper draws on works by sex work activists and works which highlight sex workers' voices, such as Jessie Patella-Rey (2018), Samantha Cooney (2018), and Natalia West and Tina Horn (2021). I supplement my theoretical arguments with data from qualitative field interviews, focus group discussions, and policy analyses of various national laws and policies which govern sexual commerce in India. I theorize consent/coercion in sex work based on works in critical/feminist literature which assert that consent and coercion must be understood as a continuum rather than a binary (Anitha and Gill 2009) and as products of conducive contexts rather than an event (Kelly 2016). Here Michelle Dempsey's framework for theorizing consent and coercion by distinguishing three norms (wrongfulness, excusability and accountability) that govern shifts in discourses and responses to sexual misconduct in the era of #MeToo is particularly valuable (2021). While Dempsey's framework is far from foolproof (I disagree with Dempsey's generalization that #MeToo has brought forth a "cultural reckoning" in terms of how people view all instances of sexual violation), her theoretical model nonetheless provides some concrete parameters against which we might measure normative transformations (or lack thereof) brought about by #MeToo. The normative shifts in how we perceive wrongfulness (coercion) and excusability (consent) of and public accountability for acts of sexual transgressions did not happen for all women. If #MeToo's significance lies in legal and social normative transformations, the limitations of the movement become obvious in the way sex workers as a subject group are still struggling to justify wrongfulness, inexcusability and demands for public accountability for acts of sexual assault and aggression against sex workers. All three norms converge to discount violence and sexual assault against sex workers.

Here, analyzing the #MeToo movement in the context of commercial sex work and sex workers' movements in India becomes important for several reasons. Feminist critics point out that #MeToo's focus on affecting policy changes in sites of formal employment hinders the movement's global appeal as it becomes inaccessible for precarious legal subjects such as sex workers, illegal immigrants, and undocumented workers (Ghadery 2019; Rottenberg 2019). As Indian anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta put it, #MeToo has potential for change but only for women "who are heard anyway" (Chandran 2017). Commercial sex workers in India...