Law, sex work and activism in India

This chapter offers the reader possible ways of making sense of opposing images of Indian sex workers by parsing through the complex terrain of the contemporary Indian sex work debates. I start by offering the context in which sex work has come to be debated in India over the past 20 years. I then delineate the varied feminist positions addressing the “prostitution question” before offering both an account of Indian sex workers’ mobilizational efforts over the same period and their articulation of a position that views sex work as a form of reproductive labor that ought to be socially and legally recognized as work.