Contagious Contestations: Sex Workers, HIV/AIDS and Centering the Margins in Kolkata

Based on ethnographic work with Durbar Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a female sex workers' (FSWs) grassroots collective in Sonagachi, the iconic red-light district in India, this paper examines the unstable link between HIV/AIDS prevention programing and constructions of 'risk'. Aligned with the wider global health programming, FSWs who were identified as a key vector of the deadly virus were labeled as a ‘high risk group’ (HRG). The moniker of risk –justified as a biomedical public health device –nonetheless, and indisputably, deepened the stigma of the women, who were already historically marginalized. Such mapping of risk on marginalized bodies is not unprecedented. Rather it has a long history even in Kolkata where Indian ‘prostitutes’ experienced the racialized oppression of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the mid-19^th century which were implemented to protect British soldiers from venereal diseases. However, ‘risk’ in the context of postcolonial feminism carries a distinct valence. Though prostitutes have long featured in arts and literature, this is the first time we hear the sex worker speak, instead of being spoken for. In this critical reversal, the sex workers as peer educators in HIV prevention, have collectively recalibrated the risk discourse to underscore the threat the virus equally poses to their bodies and livelihood. I argue that this reversal also decenters the perfunctory diseased body of the woman and centers the body and her as sites of a new feminist politics focused on labor and livelihood. Broadly speaking, the sex work collectivization exposes the entanglement amongst risk, marginalization and gender.