Gendering Precarity in Postcolonial Sites: Health Securitization and Sexual Labor in India’s Commercial Sex Trade Industry

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the vulnerability of the most marginalized populations, thus exposing the faultlines in neoliberal governance. Be it immigrants in the US, domestic migrant workers in India or violence against black bodies in western democracies, the pandemic has now enthused academics to think about the role of precarity and the resultant differential distribution of resources across the world. Amidst this, sex workers have been hard hit. On April 8, 2020 UNAIDS released a press statement asserting that as already criminalized, marginalized and living in financial precarity, ‘sex workers must not be left behind in the response to COVID-19’ (UNAIDS, Sex workers must not be left behind in the response to COVID-19, 2020). Yet, sex work precarity is by no means recent phenomenon. Sex work has been, for a long time, theorized as precarious labor and sex workers as precarious bodies. Sexual labor posits the body at the center stage of neoliberal biopolitics, whereby commodification, consumption and controlling of precarious bodies go hand-in-hand with and become integral for preserving the gendered/racialized neoliberal body politic. Thus, sexually precarious bodies become the site for several legal and pathological securitization initiatives. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.