Narratives of Resistance

Negotiating Agency and Violence in Commercial Sex Work

Abstract

The article highlights the voices of commercial sex workers from Kolkata, India, as they delineate their acts of resistance in the face of continual adversity. The narratives of the sex workers revolve around several themes. These include the framing of commercial sex work and cultural narratives surrounding their profession, implications of rescue and rehabilitation propositions, the impact of violence in sex work and the negotiation with violence in their daily lives. The article shows that even high-risk marginalized populations like sex workers can engage with and overcome barriers like criminalization, stigmatization and violence in highly gendered sectors of labor like commercial sex work. The article renders the sex workers as subjects central to their own study, generates voices for the traditionally voiceless and examines how they communicatively construct their own reality. It is explored how enunciations of the sex workers influence their identity construction and negotiation of their vocation in direct non-conformity to mainstream discourses and cultural narratives.