Abstract
Street Corner Secrets uses critical ethnography, archival research, and discourse analysis to effectively analyze the ways in which poor migrant women engage in sexual commerce as one of the means for survival and livelihood. Shah’s multisite research study has been conducted at three different locales: a nakawhich can be defined as any crossroad or street corner where day wage laborers gather to solicit construction work, a commuter street, and lastly a red-light district in Mumbai. The respondents in Shah’s study belong to the historically marginalized scheduled caste and tribe communities. Thus, the book successfully weaves together the issues of landlessness, access to water, poverty, caste, and gender into the analytic realms of sexual commerce.
Naka, the first research site is a time bound space that manifests itself during the morning when day wage workers gather to find employment. Shah explores the naka through a gendered lens, looking at women’s differential access to workspaces and the implications of seeking employment at the naka as a woman. The complexity of women’s employment at the naka is characterized by the unstated rule that contractors hire women who are willing to provide sex. Thus, the concept of “normalizing gaze” which takes for granted that all female wage workers at the naka are sexually available becomes one of the highlights of the book.
A commuter street located near a railway station is the second research site. Shah documents migrant women from rural areas, who come to Mumbai to do sex work on the street and utilize its anonymity. The women engage in agricultural labor and daily wage labor in villages, while sex work is seen as a subsidiary income generation strategy. Unlike the naka, sex work is openly solicited and negotiated on the street. Moral policing by middle-class residents and merchants on the street, police violence, and meagre earnings mark the lives of the migrant street sex workers. Therefore, one frequently comes across the notion of “izzat” (honor) and its felt subsequent loss due to engagement in sex work within woman’s narratives.
The third ethnographic site is Kamathipura, a red-light district since colonial times. Shah argues that once violence is disintegrated from prostitution, then the red-light district can be imagined as a zone where sex workers organize for work and agitate against the excesses of clients, pimps, and police. Shah documents how sex work has gone underground due to the demolition of slums, legal criminalization, and the growing interest of real estate developers in red-light districts. The temporality of residential spaces and the ever-present threat of demolition and displacement characterize the lives of participants in all three research sites.
Shah has filled a gap in gender studies and labor studies by the ethnographic study of a “hidden population,” which was until now either ignored or underrepresented in academia. She takes us beyond the “choice” vis-à-vis “force” paradigm and explores sexual commerce as negotiation for daily survival. The book makes a contribution to the sociology of everyday life by documenting the daily patterns of women in sexual commerce. However, the ethnographic study could have benefited from interviews with stakeholders like contractors, merchants, and police personnel, making it richer. The book is a must read for scholars of gendered labor, sexual labor, and women’s ethnography. Most importantly, the book will be an enriching read for anyone interested in women’s studies.