Of Festivals, Rights and Public Life: Sex Workers’ Activism in India as Affirmative Sabotage

In 2012, Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), India’s largest sex workers’ collective, organised a major Hindu religious festival of Bengal called the Durga Puja. It was a part of their rights activism for the de-criminalisation of sex work. In this article, I provide an account of this event as an act of re-ordering public life by sex workers and contend that the worldview which informs DMSC’s practice of the festival has points of convergence with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s articulation of the idea of affirmative sabotage. I argue that we are able to see this convergence between DMSC’s celebration of the festival and post-colonial feminist thought by attending to the particular location and the relations that DMSC’s practice of the Durga Puja inhabits. I situate this account of sex workers’ rights activism alongside a rival narrative of the festival put forth by Dalit and adivasi groups. I include this rival account to perform the limitation of my own reading of the political potential of DMSC’s practice of the festival. This rival assertion demands a recognition of the situatedness and limitedness of feminist practices.