‘I Entered This Life Because My Husband Left Me, I Have to Be Careful Now’: A Study of Domesticity, Intimacy and Belonging in the Lives of Women in Sex Work in a Red-Light Area in Eastern India

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore relations of intimacy and belonging within the lives of women in sex work, living in a red-light area in Eastern India. Specifically, I unpack two such relations: sexual-affective relations with long-term customers and motherhood with children born within and outside sex work. I examine how these relations are (per)formed, perceived, managed and experienced, and how they affect each other. I highlight how this process reproduces the red-light area as a space where social and emotional arrangements co-exist with the economic. Conceptually, I draw on Illouz’s (Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity, Cambridge, 2007, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Polity, Cambridge, 2012) work on ‘cold intimacies’ and the ‘architecture of choice’ to explore how agency and victimhood co-exist dynamically in the lives of women in sex work for whom the ‘domestic’ and the ‘workplace’ overlap.