To return to the abstract index press the back button on your browser
Swati Ghosh
Department of Economics, Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta
'The Flying Prostitute: Sexuality of the (Im)possible Other'
The flying prostitute is a housewife and a whore in one self. She is a housewife who undertakes prostitution under economic compulsion and is also a (sex) worker who has a family to tend and a house to keep. She is a housewife, a breadwinner for the family, a workingwoman. A workingwoman with a difference, selling sexual service for money, a whore. She keeps plying between the home and the street, within the zone of social sanction and illegality, from one woman-position to another. For her it is a tightrope walking along the trajectory connecting the two socially extreme sites of homemaking and prostitution. The belongingness to this grey and blurred area shapes her being, her identity.
She inhabits a volatile domain defined by quick flights from one position to another rather than remaining loyal to specified identities and familiar roles assigned either to a prostitute or a housewife. This is what makes her woman position phenomenal and projects her as a subject of unique interest. As a flying prostitute she performs a private act in public place such that the public-private binary is redundant. In fact, binaries such as moral-immoral, pleasure-procreation, affective-licentious lose their usual connotations with respect to her. She flies with ease through the narrow alleys of rigorous domestic norms and lands up in the forbidden arena inhibiting sexual pleasure for woman of home, ceaselessly.
A part of her social standing is sacrosanct and moral while another part is equally profane and immoral. Within domesticity it is, procreation, child-care and housework that constitutes the reproductive role of the housewife as the natural behaviour of the woman of family. In the role of the pleasure-giver, she possesses the 'dangerous sexuality of the non-mother' that fetches her a living and she is a wife and a mother, as if by default. The flying woman has to live the multiple identities that constitute her. She is the manifestation of conceptually opposing positions that negate each other. She lives with conflicts in being isolated from other workers, women workers or even other marginal groups based on distinct identities of their own. In spite of certain commonalities with other workers, she belongs to a space that is blurred and undefined. Her gendered identity of a housewife contradicts her class identity as a worker, her identity as a mother clashes with that of the non-mother, her identity as a minority group of sexual worker stands in contrast to the individual identity of a citizen. Workers solidarity emerging from the cross cuttings of class, caste, gender or other markers are not shared by her.
Prostitution has never emerged as an issue of national interest in India. The state maintains a 'tolerationist' legal approach towards prostitutes in spite of their recent emergence as a political group. The Indian feminist movement is less inclined to consider issues related to prostitution among principal struggles including domestic violence, dowry deaths or even sati. The prostitutes' organization demanding workers' rights also does not include the flying prostitute within their fold. She remains an independent streetwalker operating in-between spaces left out by the brothel-girls and at a price they would hate to accept. Non-recognition marks her worker status within family, community, law and civil society. She dwells an uninhabitable space of either a worker or a housewife while remaining tied to both with a strong positivity of her body and sexuality.
She is engaged in a complex labor process. In spite of being a part of an alarmingly increasing number, she is excluded from the category of 'employed' and not enumerated in information collecting systems. Her body is the site of work and the client buying a piecemeal ownership over her body dictates the nature of the services she provides. As a worker she produces a service to be consumed from the site of her body. As a trader she exchanges her own use-value in every transaction. In spite of being able to name her price in the market, she is restrained from being able to act with autonomy and agency. She has to deliver 'pleasure' in compliance with the desire of another. The subjugation of her labour to capital is rather invisible in her case. There is no visible appropriation of surplus value. The complexity of her class position is further imbricated with subjection to power within the trading network and household, living off her surplus. Economic exploitation along with oppression converges at the site of prostitution practiced by flying woman.
In addition to the economic class process, the cultural (meaning) and political (power) processes shape the entity of a flying woman bearing the brunt both as a homemaker and a whore. This paper intends to examine the contradictory positions of a flying prostitute woman, to explore the dimensions of multiple identities that constitute her, and to elucidate the aspects of identities that are directly in conflict and over-determine each other. It seeks to present a Marxist feminist analysis of the implication of sexual identity and the vulnerability of the (im)possible domain to which a flying woman belongs.
Bio: Swati Ghosh is an economist by training from the University of Calcutta, India. Her PhD is on capital-labor interaction in third world economic space where informal labor forms are negotiated and redefined continuously. She has worked on marginal workers, undertaking studies and surveys among the slums and squatters of Calcutta. Her publications broadly include identity, sexuality and worker-status of women in colonial and postcolonial setting with focus on widows, prostitutes, migrants and deserted women. She has articles in Economic and Political Weekly, in two books and a few monographs on the above issues. Gender and Development are two areas of constant interest to her. She engages in theory substantiated/contested by empirics at the local level. She is a member of the editorial collective of from the margins: a journal of concerned writings on gender, coloniality, and postcoloniality and has articles in the journal on body, sexuality and subjectivity. Gendered Man is a forthcoming book of the collective that includes her contribution of a chapter. Her present work is part of a larger study on prostitution relating globalization, worker's movement and sexual identity with the 'lived' experience of the prostitutes. She has participated in international seminars at Amsterdam (SEPHIS) in 2001and Afro-Asia Dialogue (CODESRIA) in 2003. Writing in Bengali vernacular and engaging at the local level is important and meaningful to her. She teaches Economics at Rabindra Bharati University and is a guest faculty at University of Calcutta. She is 42 years old, single, and she lives with her son and mother.
<swati_ghosh@vsnl.net>