Papers by Shriya Patnaik
Routledge eBooks, Jun 21, 2024
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
Despite the prostitution industry being accorded a semi-legal status in India, the status of sex-... more Despite the prostitution industry being accorded a semi-legal status in India, the status of sex-workers remains abysmal with scarce provisions towards healthcare, education/literacy and/or labour rights. Consequently, the current approach to the rights of sex-workers is ridden with several structural barriers, as existing state reform projects often violate subjects’ bodily autonomy and act as moral discipliners, leaving them vulnerable to forms of systemic and institutionalised violence. Notwithstanding such exclusions, there have been strong feminist undercurrents advocating for the inclusion of such marginalised actors. One such example is the DURBAR NGO in Kolkata comprising of many sex-workers, calling for the legalisation of the prostitution industry as its underground nature enhances networks of crime, and simultaneous workers’ stigmatisation. DURBAR workers actively champion for their rights as equal citizens, and instead critique state regulation projects that seek to mora...
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2023
Despite the prostitution industry being accorded a semi-legal status in India, the status of sex-... more Despite the prostitution industry being accorded a semi-legal status in India, the status of sex-workers remains abysmal with scarce provisions towards healthcare, education/literacy and/or labour rights. Consequently, the current approach to the rights of sex-workers is ridden with several structural barriers, as existing state reform projects often violate subjects' bodily autonomy and act as moral discipliners, leaving them vulnerable to forms of systemic and institutionalised violence. Notwithstanding such exclusions, there have been strong feminist undercurrents advocating for the inclusion of such marginalised actors. One such example is the DURBAR NGO in Kolkata comprising of many sex-workers, calling for the legalisation of the prostitution industry as its underground nature enhances networks of crime, and simultaneous workers' stigmatisation. DURBAR workers actively champion for their rights as equal citizens, and instead critique state regulation projects that seek to morally discipline them rather than providing concrete emancipation strategies or skill development. This article analyses such modalities of resistance through local channels of grassroots organisation, performative culture, and collective action. Reliant on such accounts from the margins, it elucidates how such bottom-up accounts of mobilisation, epitomise significant catalysts of agency and social change, which otherwise go missing from the dominant annals of policy and developmental discourses.
London School of Economics and Political Science, Mar 22, 2021
Electronic Journal of Social and Strategic Studies, 2021
This paper focuses on the rights of gendered minorities in India, using the case-study of the mat... more This paper focuses on the rights of gendered minorities in India, using the case-study of the matriarchal community of Mahari-Devadasis (temple-dancers in the Jagannath Temple of Orissa[i], the creators of the classical dance-form Odissi, whose kinship structures, quotidian cultures and religious practices entailed being wed to Hindu deities over mortals). Under the colonial disciplining of deviant sexualities together with racialized bio-politics across the British Empire, they were conceptualized, categorized, and criminalized as “religious prostitutes” under Contagious Disease and Prostitution regulations, from the nineteenth century onwards. However, the abolition of this matrilineal tradition, instead of improving women’s life circumstances, propelled a turn towards clandestine networks of sex-work owing to their growing socio-economic stigmatization in the modern Indian nation-state. In problematizing human rights discourses surrounding this now-extinct community in postcolonial India, my research delineates how legal statutes on Devadasi Abolition silenced minority voices by distorting the complex relationship between bodily agency, informal economies of sexual commerce, and women’s socio-economic autonomy. The demise of this localized tradition, however, was accompanied with shifts in collective memory and societal perceptions, particularly with respect to their contribution to performative culture within the regional register of Orissa, which this study encapsulates. The paper therein examines social and cultural borders through the lens of globalized cultural flows and grassroots humanitarian movements, especially in the context of such marginalized gendered minorities in South Asia. It methodologically engages with diverse sources, including colonial period archival records, ethnographic fieldwork, parliamentary debates, national women’s rights paradigms on prostitution and trafficking, oral histories dealing with the experiential domain of such disenfranchised actors, grassroots level social activist movement advocating for the inclusion of minority subjects into civil society, along with visual culture depicting the Mahari-Devadasi dance-form on global theatrical spaces. It conclusively underscores the role of social activist movements from civil society towards incorporating indigenous struggles within the ambit of global humanitarian paradigms. Through the above factors, the paper elucidates how such grassroots level feminist movements epitomize important catalysts of social change, which challenge mainstream nationalist narratives on human rights. This research thereby posits the need to recuperate such subaltern voices from the margins in writing transnational historiographies on gender, sexuality, and human rights.
Book Chapter by Shriya Patnaik
Histories of Sex Work Around the World, 2024
The Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally altered the life circumstances of sex workers in India, bring... more The Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally altered the life circumstances of sex workers in India, bringing their occupational lives to a near complete standstill. In the midst of this, the Indian Supreme Court passed a judgement in 2022 calling for a recognition of subjects' rights as rights-bearing citizens. While cognizant of their human rights and flagrant violations to dignity of life conditions, the judgement was marked by certain contradictions that this publication notes from insider accounts. In collating interviews with sex workers from Kolkata's Sonagachi district post Covid-19, along with NGO data and archival sources, this chapter highlights historical disruptions to sex workers' positioning in India, and articulates their changing life circumstances in the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial and more recently from the present years. The chapter argues for a bottom-up, inclusive lens of representation that considers sex workers' occupational choices, bodily autonomy, socio-economic agency, and freedom of mobility.
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South Asian Women and International Relations, 2023
Book Chapter in Book Borders: Physical, Social and Cultural (New Delhi: HOW Academics, 2023): pp. 111-141. ISSN 978-93-95522-94-6, 2023
South Asian Women and International Relations, 2023
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Papers by Shriya Patnaik
Book Chapter by Shriya Patnaik
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