The Gendered Proletariat: Sex Work, Workers’ Movement, and Agency

Sex workers are not factory labourers, wage workers, or domestic labour. Why, then, should they be considered a ‘gendered proletariat’? What constitutes ‘work’ in sex work? The book answers these questions through a political-economic analysis of prostitution, situated in the context of the Sonagachi movement in Kolkata, West Bengal.

Using Marxian categories of use value and exchange value and its dual in concrete labour and abstract labour, this book analyses why the incorporation of the prostitute in a worker-citizen complex is always incomplete. It traces the history of prostitution in India through the colonial and postcolonial period, along with the transformation of the role of state from penal to a watch-care model of surveillance. With respect to a sex worker’s rights, the book presents a critical observation on agency that the movement claims to have obtained.