The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade

Feminists and the global sex industry 23Another argument that Kapur makes is that prostitution is transgressive.This idea fits into the pro sexual freedom position of thenew left which led to the promotion of pornography by those creatingthe 1960s and 1970s ‘counterculture’ (see Jeffreys, 1990/91).She argues that the correct approach for feminist theorists is,therefore, to ‘focus on moments of resistance’ and thus disrupt the‘linear narrative produced by the VAW [violence against women]campaigns’ and this will ‘complicate the binary of the West andthe Rest’ (ibid., p. 29). She explains that she chooses to do this byforegrounding the ‘sex worker’ because ‘[h]er claims as a parent,entertainer, worker and sexual subject disrupt dominant sexual andfamilial norms. In post-colonial India, her repeated performancesalso challenge and alter dominant cultural norms. From her peripherallocation, the sex worker brings about a normative challengeby negotiating her disclaimed or marginalized identity within morestable and dominant discourses’ (ibid., p. 31). But the idea thatprostituted women transgress the social norms of heterosexualityand the heteropatriarchal family is by no means clear in India andPakistan, where forms of family prostitution thrive (Saeed, 2001;Agrawal, 2006b).In her research on family prostitution in Bombay in the 1920sand 1930s, Ashwini Tambe specifically refutes the notion that prostitutedwomen should be seen as transgressive (Tambe, 2006). Shestresses the continuities between families and brothels. She says thatfeminist theory is wrong in always locating prostitution ‘outsidethe ambit of official familial institutions’ (Tambe, 2006, p. 220).She criticizes the idea put forward by what she calls ‘sex radicals’that prostitution has the potential to ‘sever the link between sexand long-term intimacy and allow the performance of undomesticatedsexualities that challenge common prescriptions of femininepassivity’ (ibid., p. 221). What, she asks, ‘do we make of sexworkers who are, effectively, domesticated?’ (ibid., p. 221). Shecites national studies from India in the present that show that for32 per cent of prostituted women ‘kith and kin’ were responsiblefor their entry into prostitution, and that 82 per cent of prostitutedwomen in Bombay have and raise children in brothels.Precisely similar family structures exist in Calcutta’s brothels too,she points out. Many prostituted women remain in brothels becausethey have been born there. In her historical study she found thathusbands and mothers delivered girls and women to brothels.Brothel keepers adopted maternal roles towards the girls delivered