Overview

Street Corner Secrets challenges widespread notions of sex work in India by examining solicitation in three spaces within the city of Mumbai that are seldom placed within the same analytic frame-brothels, streets, and public day-wage labor markets (nakas), where sexual commerce may be solicited discretely alongside other income-generating activities. Focusing on women who migrated to Mumbai from rural, economically underdeveloped areas within India, Svati P. Shah argues that selling sexual services is one of a number of ways women working as laborers may earn a living, demonstrating that sex work, like day labor, is a part of India's vast informal economy. Here, various means of earning-legitimized or stigmatized, legal or illegal-overlap or exist in close proximity to one another, shaping a narrow field of livelihood options that women navigate daily. In the course of this rich ethnography, Shah discusses policing practices, migrants' access to housing and water, the idea of public space, critiques of states and citizenship, and the discursive location of violence within debates on sexual commerce. Throughout, the book analyzes the epistemology of prostitution, and the silences and secrets that constitute the discourse of sexual commerce on Mumbai's streets.

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9780822356981

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Reviews

I learned a tremendous amount from Street Corner Secrets. Svati P. Shah thoughtfully and passionately lays out the struggles poor women face every day and their creative attempts to survive and move forward. Her concern about and respect for the women she meets shines through on every page. This is the best of engaged anthropology. It will become a classic on gendered labor, sexual labor, and the precarity of informal work. In this powerful ethnography, Svati P. Shah attends to the practices of everyday life, the political economy of space, and more generally to a methodology that does not just give lip service to ending the analytic isolation of sex work but instead models an extraordinary form of critical and reflexive ethnography. This is a critical contribution to scholarship on labor and contemporary political and market transformation.

I learned a tremendous amount from Street Corner Secrets . Svati P. Shah thoughtfully and passionately lays out the struggles poor women face every day and their creative attempts to survive and move forward. Her concern about and respect for the women she meets shines through on every page. This is the best of engaged anthropology. It will become a classic on gendered labor, sexual labor, and the precarity of informal work. --Denise Brennan, author of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States

In this powerful ethnography, Svati P. Shah attends to the practices of everyday life, the political economy of space, and more generally to a methodology that does not just give lip service to ending the analytic isolation of sex work but instead models an extraordinary form of critical and reflexive ethnography. This is a critical contribution to scholarship on labor and contemporary political and market transformation. -- Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things I learned a tremendous amount from Street Corner Secrets. Svati P. Shah thoughtfully and passionately lays out the struggles poor women face every day and their creative attempts to survive and move forward. Her concern about and respect for the women she meets shines through on every page. This is the best of engaged anthropology. It will become a classic on gendered labor, sexual labor, and the precarity of informal work. -- Denise Brennan, author of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States

I learned a tremendous amount from Street Corner Secrets. Svati P. Shah thoughtfully and passionately lays out the struggles poor women face every day and their creative attempts to survive and move forward. Her concern about and respect for the women she meets shines through on every page. This is the best of engaged anthropology. It will become a classic on gendered labor, sexual labor, and the precarity of informal work. -- Denise Brennan, author of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States In this powerful ethnography, Svati P. Shah attends to the practices of everyday life, the political economy of space, and more generally to a methodology that does not just give lip service to ending the analytic isolation of sex work but instead models an extraordinary form of critical and reflexive ethnography. This is a critical contribution to scholarship on labor and contemporary political and market transformation. -- Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things Street Corner Secrets is a nuanced ethnographic exploration of lives of poor migrant women who are part of the urban informal economy in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai... [T]his book is a significant contribution to making sense of the place of sex work in the lives of poor migrant women in urban India. -- Anjua Agrawal American Anthropologist Based on critical ethnography, archival research, and discourse analysis, Svati Shah makes an important intervention in the ongoing feminist debates on sex work... Shah provides in this book... a much needed focus on the political economy of sexual commerce. -- Manisha Desai Gender & Society Overall, this book's ethnography makes a vibrant contribution to urban anthropology. Crafting an understanding of sexual labour that reflects the intricacies of rural-urban migration, the book sheds light on the management of knowledge around sex work, from secrecy to the rehabilitation of 'rescued' prostitutes, and shows how spaces occupied by women sex workers have multiple uses and meanings in Mumbai's contested urban landscape. -- Atreyee Sen Pacific Affairs Svati P. Shah's new book Street Corner Secrets makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around sex work in India... Multi-sited urban ethnography alongside meticulous participant observation, provides a fascinating insight into Shah's participants. -- Rohit Dasgupta Royal Society for Asian Affairs Journal

In this powerful ethnography, Svati P. Shah attends to the practices of everyday life, the political economy of space, and more generally to a methodology that does not just give lip service to ending the analytic isolation of sex work but instead models an extraordinary form of critical and reflexive ethnography. This is a critical contribution to scholarship on labor and contemporary political and market transformation. --Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things

Author Information

Svati P. Shah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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