[Cover page of ‘First National Conference of Sex Workers’, downloaded from the Feminist Law Archives (http://feministlawarchives.pldindia.org)] [1]

The Sex Workers’ Manifesto was submitted by the members of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Women’s Coordination Committee) at the first National Conference of Sex Workers in India held in Calcutta from 14th to 16th November 1997.

The document began by laying down the key arguments and objectives of the sex workers’ movement in India. The main claim was that concrete aims like controlling the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV was only possible if sex workers were understood in their ‘totality’, i. e. as individuals, with a range of tangible and intangible needs, who are shaped by their ideological, political and material contexts (1). The manifesto also suggested that it was crucial that sex work was understood as one of the oldest professions of the world that met important ‘social demands’ (2, emphasis added). It is important to note here that the document used the phrase ‘social demand’ and therefore did not reduce sex work to a profession that predominantly met (male) biological needs. The key emphasis here was to ensure that sex workers are empowered and recognised as legitimate workers or citizens and to interrogate the idea that the rehabilitation of sex workers is something that is desirable.

Moreover, drawing our attention to the misplaced societal focus on sexual morality vis-à-vis sex work, the document argued that in a country where unemployment is a key social problem, ostracizing scores of women in sex work who are involved in an income-generating profession and thereby supporting their own selves and their families is unfair. While workers in other similarly exploitative professions can continue to remain in those jobs and demand better working conditions, sex workers are prevented from doing the same. The manifesto further argued that the children of sex workers belong to the sex workers themselves and unlike children of the rest of the population, those children are not instrumentalised and used as mere means to perpetuate a man’s genealogy and to maintain his property.

In a key section of this document entitled ‘Do men and women have equal claims to sexuality?’, it was argued that there is minimal room for the expression of women’s autonomous sexuality within the political economy that grounds modern practices of sexuality. The only way in which women can exhibit some degree of autonomy in India at the time, it further asserted, was by showing their ability to become consumers (and that ability too was shaped by patriarchal and heteronormative cultural scripts).

The document also highlighted the fact that although the sex workers’ movement is geared against patriarchy, it is not against individual male persons. At this juncture, the document points out something significant. It contends, ‘The same system of productive relations and logic of profit maximisation which drives men from their homes in villages to towns and cities, make women into sex workers for these men’ (3, emphasis added). In the process, it underscores the bourgeois material structures that, albeit in different ways, simultaneously impacts both men and women.

The manifesto further argues that in a capitalist patriarchal structure, not just sex workers but all women who inhabit beyond the realm of conjugality are identified as potential and often actual threats to the institution of the family. It then adds that the objective of the sex workers’ movement is by no means the dismantling of the institution of the family. However, what it does consider as its objective is to highlight the structures of oppression and inequality that are pegged to the notion of an ‘ideal’ family; structures that normalise and rationalize unjust hierarchies within the family. What the movement interrogates most about the institution of the family is the pegging of the notion of sexual fidelity to the practice of inheritance via purportedly legitimate heirs.

Further, the manifesto shows how the Madonna-Whore Complex (MWC), a key discourse within the discipline of psychoanalysis, has caused ill-judged divisions between women, oriented towards the sole objective of ruling over and controlling all women. Within this discourse, the so-called ‘whore’ cannot be loved, and the purported ‘Madonna’ or mother-figure cannot be desired. This misplaced binary opposition, according to the document, has meant that while men at least have sex workers to go to in order to fulfill their desires for intimacy, women do not have such options. The only option that women are left with is to become sex workers in the sex industry. However, the sex worker or the so-called whore within the M-W complex, according to the document, meets a range of extra-sexual demands of men. Additionally, the manifesto suggests that free choice, under all circumstances, is a myth. Even a casual domestic labourer does not become one out of their free, autonomous, sovereign choice. They do so because they have no option but to become a casual domestic labourer.

In addition to this, the manifesto expresses a significant amount of unease about the accusation that the sex work industry facilitates irresponsible and unaccountable sex. It argues that the industry’s objective is, in fact, just the opposite. They aim for a space that is grounded upon, what they call, ‘independent, democratic, non-coercive, mutually pleasurable and safe sex’ (6). However, the document simultaneously admits that the members of the movement do not yet have a finished picture of what this notion of independence and autonomy will look like in practice.

Further, the manifesto argues that the movement has two key tenets. The first one involves debating and redefining issues pertaining to sexuality, poverty and gender that arise within the movement itself. The second one involves resisting dominant ideologies that prevent sex workers from gaining control of their own industry, namely the sex work industry.

The document concludes by highlighting that within two years of the coming into existence of the Women’s Coordination Committee, male sex workers showed their eagerness to join the initiative. The predominant role of these sex workers was to provide sexual services to homosexual men. The Committee thought that the inclusion of male sex workers within the movement made the sex workers’ movement truly rigorous and non-discriminatory. To this extent, the manifesto contended that the quibbles and questions about sexuality that the sex workers’ movement is raising is not only geared towards the welfare of sex workers but also towards the welfare of any individual and community that is challenging subordination in any form, both in societal structures and within their own ideological formations.

A lasting legacy of this document, among other things, was two-fold: First, it helped locate sex work within the production relations of a society; and second, it showed how relations of production of a society could perpetuate themselves only by grounding themselves on hetero-patriarchal social scripts.

Footnotes

[1] The material and documents on this platform are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial India 2.5 license.

References

Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee. 1997. First National Conference of Sex Workers. Available at: https://feministlawarchives.pldindia.org/wp-content/uploads/30a.-First-National-Conference-of-Sex-Workers_Part-I.pdf?